Ascension
by aadarshinah
Summary: The cycle of galatic distruction has continued for millions of years. Only a handful of relays connect dark space to the inhabited areas of the galactic disc; they must be destroyed. PostME2. Shenko
1. The Normandy Prelude

**Ascension**  
or, The Third Symphony

* * *

"_The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it."  
_Marcus Aurelius _Meditations_

* * *

**The **_**Normandy**_** Prelude**

She stared at the file on her terminal with unseeing eyes, the words quickly merging together until it was nothing but a blur of orange light in an otherwise dark and all too empty cabin. Blinking fastidiously, she forced herself to read the words, as if doing so would make it all seem somehow more real as if, by reading them, she could somehow force herself to believe that two years had passed; that funerals had been held, memorials built, and the truth about Saren and _Sovereign_ buried so deep you'd get lost in the paperwork. Her eyes did not stay focused long and she moved to rub the exhaustion from her eyes.

She stopped, though, seeing her hands in the faint orange light: a tracery of thin lines that had not been there before ran across her hands and, on closer inspection, up her arm too. She traced one of the impossibly straight lines with a finger, trying to figure out where she might've gotten them, before pulling back abruptly.

Skin grafts.

That thought made everything suddenly more real. Closing her eyes, she could see as if it were yesterday (and it _was_ yesterday, for her at least, and everything, from the stab of both shock and fear that had rushed through her when the particle beam had cut through the deck plating between her and the last escape pod, to the pain that had exploded through her newly-healed shoulder as she was propelled out of the _Normandy_ as the ship tore apart, hitting what might've once been a piece of the outer hull, or the grav plating, or God-knew what else with such force that, for a moment, her vision had blackened. When it returned, it brought with it the _Normandy_'s final breath as the high-charged beams cut through the fuel tanks and sent the whole thing into flames as the atmosphere poured into the vacuum... and then everything was black again. Some of the shiner bits of wreckage caught the light of this system's sun, and, for a moment, she almost thought it was beautiful before the faint tendrils of white mist caught her eye and she felt, more than heard, the leak in her O2 line. She'd spun about wildly, trying to reach the line with her hands, but a bruised shoulder and limited-flexibility suit stopped her. She still tried. She remembered wondering if the atmosphere on the planet below was breathable, if the temperature and pressure controls on her suit were still functioning and how long they might last if they were; if a standard issue enviro suit was strong enough to survive re-entry...).

Shepherd found herself staring at her hands (how much of her skin had been replaced? were her fingerprints even the same as they'd been before?), bending and flexing her fingers in something between horror and astonishment (the bones there, how many were original? how many had been repaired? how many had needed to be completely regrown though the use of cybernetics? how much metal and machinery was still in her body, replacing joints, stimulating her muscles, keeping her heart beating?), before raising them to her face and probing there, as if she might feel any differences there (her scars from the Blitz were gone, that she knew, but what else had changed? her eyes were they vat grown or had her own survived the vacuum of space? _had_ she been exposed to vacuum, or had her body hit the atmosphere and-?).

She knew if she looked, she'd find the details in the file she had open now. The vital statistics were there but so was everything else, right down to the mockery her death had become and everything that had happened since that the Council and the Alliance had seen and subsequently ignored while Cerberus-

It could all be a lie. Not Freedom's Progress that was writing on the wall if there ever was any but the part about Cerberus being the only ones to be doing anything about it. Everything in this file could be misinformation, designed to get her to help them with, with- well, with what, she didn't know, but it was possible. But Joker and Dr. Chakwas wouldn't be with Cerberus if they'd any other moral choice-

Helene Shepherd, once a Lieutenant Commander, humanity's first Spectre, hung her head in her hands and tried, not for the first time, not to remember.

* * *

a/n: Well, here is my first attempt at _Mass Effect_ fan fiction. I'm going with a Vangaurd/Colonist/War Hero, and this should (after the intial two or three chappies) evolve into some kind of possible ME3 fic... reveiws are always welcome.


	2. The First Movement: Eroico

****

The First Movement

* * *

_Eroico_

* * *

At his most cynical, he likened his time with her to a virus. Shepherd could get inside your head and leave a seed there that never quite left that made you think and want things that had seemed impossible before. It was this part of him that told him he was a madman, that no one ever came out of the Omega 4 Relay, and that pacing the bridge of the _SSV Passchendaele_ was going to do no one any good.

That he was here at all was another sign of Shepherd's - for lack of a better word - infection.

Three days before, he'd been in Councillor Anderson's office on the Citadel, playing more or less the glorified assistant until they could convince the Alliance that while, yes, the Collectors may have attacked Horizon because he was on it, they weren't likely to pull that stunt again, especially not if they knew how things had gone with his and Shepherd's reunion.

Their reunion. He knew he should've handled it better, but it was just, just such a shock to see that, this time, the rumours were true, and that she was alive, and on Horizon, doing what she did best while the world fell to pieces around her (though, to her benefit, only half the colony had been destroyed), with two Cerberus operatives. To see her alive again but working for Cerberus-

He couldn't help but wonder if he should've gone with her, because, in away, she was right, because at least Cerberus was doing _something _while the Council pretended that the Reaper threat never existed, but that was just another symptom of Shepherd's intoxicating effects on people. He'd never thought of leaving the Alliance, especially not then, with the dark-haired woman at her side all but spouting the wonders of the terrorist group. But the idea had lingered. It may have been vigilante justice, but at least it was justice...

He'd been thinking just that in Anderson's office when his omni-tool had made a plaintive beep. He hadn't even spared it a thought when Councillor Anderson, working at his private terminal, quietly cursed. This was nothing strange, though his comment, "_Alenko__, you should see this," _a moment later was.

On Anderson's screen was what was obviously a security feed, a time stamp no more than two hours old in thin, hard-to-read numerals across the bottom, showing what appeared to be the cockpit of a smaller military vessel. As the footage played, a synthesized voice spoke, _"I have__ finished packaging the mission data, Jeff,"_ from off-camera.

The pilot's chair turned towards the camera, Joker unmistakably at the helm of this unknown ship. "_You're__ getting sloppy in your old age, EDI. Shepherd wanted that stuff, not me."_

"_I am not, as you say, Jeff, 'getting sloppy'. Commander Shepherd has asked that you send the message to the Alliance. She seems to think that its contents would go over better if someone less controversial passed them along."_

Joker snorted. "_Fine__, EDI. Send it under my name. Whatever. I'm sure you do things like that all the time without asking permission._

"_Would you like to include a personal message?"_

"_A personal message? EDI, what am I supposed to say? 'Here, I don't know why Shepherd wants to do this, 'cause you covered it all up last time, but here's everything we have on the Collectors; we're about to get ourselves killed going through the Omega 4 Relay, so we thought you'd like to know'?"_

"_Perhaps, Jeff. I am not salient on all aspects of human interaction."_

Turning back to his controls, Joker sighed. "_Just__ send it, alright?"_

"_Understood, Jeff_." As the camera footage ended, a series of files had opened. The long and short of them was that Shepherd was trying to save the galaxy again and, this time, he wasn't with her. The idea of it had unsettled him.

That was three days ago. The feeling had grown insurmountably since then, as orders had been faked, and a pair of Turian cruisers and three Alliance frigates - the _Okinawa, Heraclea, _and _Passchendaele_ - had been sent out to the Sahrabarik system, ostensibly for the dual purposes of reminding the Terminus systems that the Council wasn't as far away as they liked to believe and to protect a Salarian science ship that was coming to study the Omega 4 Relay. It wouldn't be too long before someone remembered that displays of force in the Terminus usually involved more ships and that the Salarian expedition was taking quite a while to get here. He knew he should be working on it instead of pacing the length of the _Passchendaele, _growing more and more worried and, with it, irritable, with each passing hour.

Three days. The _Normandy_ _SR-2_ had passed through the relay nearly sixty hours ago. Various "authorities" from Omega had all confirmed this, many more concerned that the relay had continued to remain active after Shepherd and her crew had passed through then that there were five rather well-armed ships from a government none of them recognized as their own hanging about near that same relay.

She could be dead. Again. She could have gone through the relay and destroyed whatever lay beyond and been destroyed in the process. She could have failed utterly (no, that was a traitorous, impossible thought that the the mere consideration of caused a knife of raw emotion to fester in his chest). She could be on her way back now. He could never know. And the fact that he didn't couldn't know was killing him.

No, that was wrong. It was the things he knew that were killing him, and he knew all too well the extent of the danger the galaxy was facing... And Shepherd knew best of all, the memories of the Prothean's destruction haunting her dreams. If she still had those memories. If he was still the woman he thought she was.

For the fifth time that hour, Staff Commander Alenko told himself that she had to be. She wouldn't be Shepherd if she wasn't risking her life on this suicide mission. She wouldn't be Shepherd if she couldn't do the impossible. Therefore, because she was gone, she was the same and, because she was the same, she'd be back.

But still he wondered and still he paced, the soldiers on deck did their best to pretend they didn't see.

He was near explaining this to himself for the sixth time when, suddenly, the relay they were circling began to glow brighter, spin faster-

Alenko stopped his pacing. "Ready the cannons," he ordered, coming to rest behind the pilot.

"Sir?"

"Do it, Holmes," he repeated, bracing himself as the call went out to man battle stations, not just in the _Passchendaele_, but all five ships. If it was the Collectors, five ships would not be enough. Five hundred ships wouldn't be enough.

"What's going on, Alenko?" came the voice of Captain Cameron, CO of the _Heraclea, _her voice sounding high-pitched and childish over the comm though the woman was tough-as-nails. She'd served on the _SVV Medina_ during the First Contact War and was one of those officers who was uncannily good at her job but had such a screwed-up personal life that she'd never been promoted above captain. Naturally, he thought, she'd be the first one to figure out that something wasn't quite right. "Unless the Salarians are coming _through_ the relay-"

The relay suddenly pulsed, and from its sickly red depths came an explosion of light and flame as something, large and dark and ominous, begins to claw it's way across unknown light years-

* * *

A voice crackled over the comms, "Ship, inbound, five o'clock."

"Is it Collector?" Shepherd asked, hands going reflexively for the shotgun at her side before she remembered where she was as headed for the nearest access shaft instead and started climbing; it was a tight fit in full armour, but she wasn't waiting for the elevator to get to the CIC, and she'd hardly taken the armour off while they'd been conducting repairs enough in Collector territory to get the _Normandy_ to a friendly dock. "Tali, Daniels, Donnelly, get that CBT shielding fixed I don't care what systems you have to take power from to do it."

She came out hear the elevators and, after evading the tangle of people, limbs, and machinery that abounded in the CIC fixing critical systems, and she came to stand behind Joker, who was cursing. "No idea what the thing is. Doesn't look like any of the Collector ships we've seen so far, or anything Reaper, but odds are it's nothing friendly."

"How fast can you get us out of here?"

"Not fast enough for them not to see us, even if they couldn't see through our stealth systems."

"Then we better hope we can outrun them."

"ETA to the relay, five minutes."

"EDI, tell me we have good news."

"Tali reports that repairs to the shields should hold as long as we are not engaged in direct combat. As the majority of my weaponry remains inoperable-"

"Faster it is, then."

* * *

a/n: _Eroico - "_Heroically_"_


	3. The First Movement: Velocissimo

_Velocissimo_

* * *

She felt helpless on starships. She was a marine. Sfhe needed a gun in her hands and the biotics at her disposal to fight. Aboard the _Normandy_, none of her skills mattered; techs and targeting computers had to be trusted to protect her crew. But still the fear remained that something could happen to the _Normandy_ again that she could not stop again because she was no tech, because shipboard systems made no sense to her; because she could barely work at a terminal without a bad case of static shock.

Worst of all, battles in space gave you nowhere to run. Not if something happened to your ship, that is. Shepherd had long ago learned the value of running when situation required it, and not having an escape root made her restive and irritable. Too many days between planets and missions made her almost downright disagreeable. She knew it hadn't been this bad Before (with capital letters: it was the word to which the entirety of her life before Cerberus had rebuilt her had been condensed. Her first life) and knew it was a senseless worry with Joker and EDI at the helm, but after three days in Collector space (which had immediately followed an excursion to The Sea of Shadows, which had itself come of the heals of a trip to Hawking Eta) with most systems damaged, fried, or less than useless, she'd been on her last nerve.

The inbound ship, at least, provided her with a reasonable release for her tensions, though the seals on the engine repairs were still setting, half the cannons had had their targeting computers damaged, the other half seemed in danger of burning down the ship the first time they were fired, and the only thing that she could do in situations like this was work on repairs and pray for the best. Seeing as how any attempt she made to fix anything on the ship would likely end with her making the problem significantly worse, that left only praying, and she had not done that in a long time. Her parents had been nominally Sikh in the same way they were nominally French which is to say _their_ parents had owned copies of the _Adi Granth _and come from the region of Bordeaux but had failed to empress much of either upon their daughter before their deaths, and the only traces of either ancestry she'd kept was a tic-mark on a if-you-die-while-in-Alliance-service,-what-should-we-do-with-your-remains form when she enlisted and the tendency to count to _dix _rather than ten when trying to calm her nerves.

Shepherd indulged in this habit as she made her way back through the CIC and to the access shaft, muttering an, "_Un, deux, trois_," as she slid rather than climbed her way down a level, feeling rather too much blood coursing through her veins to put up with an elevator at the moment. She passed through "_quatre__"_ and "_cinq" _in something almost akin to calm, having decided the best place to "watch" the flight from the unknown ship would be in the mess, where she was fully out of the way of anyone who might actually be doing something useful. The entire point of the exercise, however, became moot a moment later, when she heard the _click-click-boom_ of the _Normandy_'s working cannons from the battery behind, and "_six, "__sept__,"_ and "_huit" _quickly followed through clenched teeth as she jumped out of the seat she'd just taken and headed for the main battery. Seeing three crewmen busy connecting and reconnecting cables in the narrow aisle between guns in addition to the two aliens she'd expected to find there, "_neuf"_ came out like a curse and "_dix"_ an angry hiss as she dropped down beside a pair of Turian legs sticking out from under the nearest cannon.

"How we doing, Garrus?"

"We've been worse," he said confidently, sliding farther back so that his next words became somewhat muffled, "but we've certainly been better."

The cannons fired again and Shepherd started another round of counting. EDI chose that moment to announce on a private comm channel that the unknown vessel had altered its course to intercept the _Normandy_ at the relay and, at its current speed, would likely catch them. Faster wasn't an option, because there simply wasn't a way in the debris field to go any faster, even with Joker's exceptional skills...

Unbuckling her chestplate, Shepherd remembered just how much she hated space battles, and slid under the opposite cannon, looking for something even she could fix.

* * *

"Fire on that ship!"

Enough of the servicemen at the battery controls must have been stationed with the Fifth Fleet during the Battle of the Citadel or knew to obey without question an order like his, because immediately the ship shuddered as it shot dark energy-charged torpedoes at the unknown vessel.

His comm to Captain Cameron was still open and she, hearing his command, relayed it to her gunners, the _Okinawa_, and the Turian cruisers.

"Aim for the arms. They're the most vulnerable points."

"You've seen something like this before, Commander?"

"It's-" The ship was vaguely squid-like, with three long claws or tentacles or arms surrounding its glowing mass effect core at its stern. Its core, however, didn't glow blue with eezo, but a sickly, twisted red that writhed angrily and sent out tendrils that licked at its cage and tried so far unsuccessfully to escape its bounds. It bulged around the middle, nearly doubling in width, before narrowing again to a flattened, reflective bow that flashed with the orange light of Sahrabarik as turned to face the _Passchendaele- _No, the unknown ship was turning a full hundred-eighty degrees, completely disinterested in the ships firing at it. It provided perfect positioning to fire at its arms, but also a fear, because anything so willing to expose a weakness couldn't be as weak as expected, though the blood-coloured drive seemed to almost be aflame from the way it flickered...

"The relay is activating again."

"Holmes," Alenko asked the navigator, "Any read on the new ship?"

"Not yet. Just that it's a hell of a lot smaller, sir."

Kaidan didn't hold a hope that it was the _Normandy. _No, his thoughts were quickly tripping down a path of thought he did not like, causing a stab of fear to pierce him that his grandmother, were she still alive, would have called the chill of someone walking over his grave:Shepherd, no matter which flag she sailed under, would never let a Reaper vessel into an inhabited system if there was anything she could do to stop it. Ergo, there was nothing she could do to stop it. As she'd do anything, up to and including all methods self-destructive, to stop such a thing, than she had to have failed. Failure meant death. He'd only just gotten her back; he didn't know if he could take her death a second time. Not before he'd a chance to-

He shook himself, reminding himself that this was what Shepherd did to people. He was a solider. A marine. Any smaller ship that was likely to follow this unknown was bound to be a corvette of some type; something manoeuvrable but with limited weaponry. The servicemen aboard would know how to handle them. The best Commander Alenko could do was let them do their jobs and refuse to think about implications. Those could be saved for after if there was an after. So he concentrated on the ship with the red drive core instead.

A shout of disbelief came from the CIC behind, startling him out of his contemplation. "Something has to be wrong with the scanners! They're saying it's an _Alliance_ vessel coming through the relay. But that can't be- Commander, it's saying it's the _Valmy, _but I know for a fact that it's still in the shipyards at Arcturus-"

It wasn't the _Valmy_. It couldn't have been. But the _Valmy_ was a stealth ship of experimental design. A frigate, more specifically, of Normandy-class.

A moment later, the _Normandy SR-2_ shot through the relay.

* * *

a/n: _Velocissimo_ - "As Quickly As Possible"

As for the French, "Mindoir" always struck me as a French-sounding name, so I figured, why not. And as for the sikh thing? I just wanted to choose something unusual. Originally, I was going to mention Zorocrastianism, but this seemed to fit better. Neither are really important to this story, just things I felt like adding. The Battle of Valmy is considered by some to be a macro-historical fight, rather like The Battle of Normandy and that of Ain Jalut (the other Normandy-class ship).


	4. The First Movement: Incalzando

_Incalzando_

* * *

Sliding on her back underneath the firing and half-repaired cannons, Shephefrd found her way to the far end of the main battery, where Mordin was humming something to himself reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan as he did things she didn't even attempt to understand with the wiring of the end-most gun. "Ah, good, you're here, Shepherd," he said, seemingly unperturbed by the firing of the guns on either side of him, "need additional pair of hands. Finding arrangement of controls on some equipment unsuited for Salarian use. Believe this intentional during Cerberus design as majority of non-human species are tridactyl. Considering intentions of Illusive Man always to obtain xenodiverse team for mission, will share several words on matter if ever find him." He gestured towards a small welding torch and then the next cannon down, "Jury-rigging replacement targeting VIs from spare medical supplies. VIs must be welded to canon so as not to unseat during battle and Crewman Rolston is not available."

Pleased beyond belief to have something to do with her hands to keep her mind off the unknown ship chasing them, she grabbed the welding torch and a pair of what looked like metal lunch boxes and slid herself under the indicated cannon. She'd kept her grieves on, though it made it a tight fit, and grimly set about figuring which way the lunch box-thing was supposed to go. It only took her a moment – a lucky moment; the only tech skills she could attest to were ones that blew things up, usually unintentionally – and it attached easily enough, though the angle was awkward and caused a strange ache in her shoulder. The artificial one.

She knew that vast amounts of her body had been reconstructed or replaced, mostly internal organs. Both of her eyes, part of her heart muscle; sixty percent of her skin – things that she'd the unfortunate inability not to learn about her resurrection. The cloned replacements she could handle. Fundamentally, those parts were still her, even if some genetic therapy had been snuck in, making her stronger and faster than she remembered. It was the cybernetics that – there was no other word for it – freaked her out. She'd done her utmost best not to learn the details, she really had, but she knew that the shoulder she'd injured being thrown form the original _Normandy_'s wreckage was artificial; so were some of her ribs.

Doing her best to ignore the ache (which threatened to become more as she imagined metal grinding against metal in the rotating joint to the point where she thought she could hear the harsh scraping as she shimmied out from her the turret she'd attached the lunch box VI to, though it was, she realized a second later, only the sound of the bottom half of her armour against the floor), she moved on to the next cannon down the line. There were forty-eight in total in the main battery, the majority of the _Normandy_'s armament, though a handful of smaller guns some servicemen called "pot-shots" were affixed on the bow; those guns were useless in a fire-fight between ships and simply served as deterrents for anyone stupid enough to try and steal a ship while in port. Only twenty were working at the moment. Getting the rest working gave her an objective, and the pain, while unpleasant, was at least better than letting herself be carried away by fear that this unknown ship would cup through this _Normandy_ just like they had the old one, and, this time, they were in Collector space. If that worst of possibilities happened, escape pods were useless, because there was nowhere to escape to...

Shepherd did not fear her own death, not even knowing that, having died once, only a group of xenophobic terrorists had carried on the fight to stop the Reapers. She'd sent all the information she'd had on both them and the Collectors to the two people she trusted most: Anderson and Kaidan.

Kaidan.

She flicked on the welding torch again and carefully placed the case containing the VI against the malfunctioning cannon and thought of Horizon and how much better it should've gone. She could understand the shock – she was supposed to be dead after all and, if one of her brothers, taken by slavers on Mindoir, had done the same on her, she'd probably have felt the same way – but not the anger. It wasn't her fault Cerberus had found a way to bring her back. Hell, he'd been _alive_ at least the last two years. He could've done something from inside the Alliance to get them to do _something _about the Reaper threat rather then bury it under so much shit the whole issue probably had developed satellites and fledgling life of its own. If anybody _but_ Cerberus had been doing anything, she would've-

But they hadn't. So it was pointless to worry herself over it, just like it was pointless to wonder how her life might've gone had the slavers never come. She did both, though, and the third of thinking how much better she might feel now if Kaidan was here with her on this new _Normandy_. He could be so controlled and disciplined that, at first, she'd thought she'd just been seeing what she'd wanted in their conversations, and even after could package everything away, each emotion in its tidy little compartment, so that nothing could interfere with his perfect solider façade. It was irritating as hell at times but, God, when he stopped playing her subordinate and- And daydreaming over a man she couldn't have wasn't going to fix anything. Even if she wanted to kick his ass for what he'd said on Horizon.

He, at least, had a copy of the Collector data, as did Anderson, and, should the worst happen...

Flicking off the welder, she grabbed two more of the makeshift VIs and was shimmying under the next broken cannon – the sixth one on the right, with working ones on all sides, so that when EDI opened a comm the AI's voice was barely audible, even with the receiver implanted inside her ear. "Shepherd, our weapons appear to be having little effect on the unknown ship."

She let slip a, "_Putain de merde,"_ and tried to move faster, though welding, it seemed, was an activity that could only go so fast.

"How's she holding up, EDI?"

"There is no new damage to report, primarily because the inbound ship is not attacking and," if an AI could sound shocked, EDI did, "does not appear to be charging any weapons of known design." Shepherd started to ask what the hell the ship was doing if not attacking, reaching to flick the welder off as she prepared to move on to the next cannon down the line, when AI interrupted, "Correction: enemy weapons charging. All hands, brace for impact."

* * *

_The air was dry and hot, even for the colony, and the smell of smoke was in the air. The light was a sickly shade of red and the smell of smoke was in the air. Sand slipped away underneath his feet as he tried to run, cradling an injured arm close to his side. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, but he must try-_

-the scene flickered, images – nanocircuits and microprocessors buried in yellow, slightly bulbous, flesh – a panicked mob, fleeing through the streets of what might've been Tenochtitlan or Angkor Wat, each vaguely humanoid in shape with a look of what could only have been fear on their strange, triangular heads – weapons fired from orbit that shook the whole planet, triggering unstoppable seismic events that flattened continent-sprawling cities – and a dozen others that passed too fast for her frantically working brain to process. Some were old, almost familiar images she remembered from the beacons at Eden Prime, Virmire, and Joab; others were new, scenes that even with the cipher Shiala had shared with her on Feros were difficult to understand-

And then there was a voice, calling her by name and whispering on the edge of her consciousness: "Shepherd, we have heard of you."

It was as if she'd stumbled across another Prothean beacon, but that was impossible: she was wedged halfway under a cannon in the main battery. Prothean visions did not just suddenly come to people trying to repair their starships as Collector ships open fire on them. Unless-

_-colonies everywhere were being destroyed. No word from the Citadel in nearly five cycles, since the relays had stopped working. Refugees from the next system had spoken of unknown horrors descending upon the ecumenopolis there. Half of the fleet that had been stranded in the system when the relays failed had been sent to investigate, but that was three years ago and nothing had been heard of them since. Fuel reserves on the remaining ships were running low. All but the most essential of interplanetary ships had been grounded. If he could get to one of those left for dead in the desert, he could escape. If it had fuel. If the strange, mysterious attackers and their swarms did not get him before he found one. If he did not bleed out-_

-unless it was a Prothean speaking to her now.

"We were once those of which you speak. We are Prothean no more." The scenes of machinery mated to living flesh repeated themselves, and of a single entity-

_-swarms had followed the trail of blood and caught him long after the last tower of the ancestors' temple was beyond sight. His first thought was death, but, slowly, after an unknown time his senses returned, and he found himself in a dark and dirty space that might've once been a storeroom on a small ship. There was another with him, a man who only muttered and said, over and over again, how the others had been taken and never returned, though their screams would echo through the halls long after they were gone. He'd thought the other man had been driven mad until the day, not long after he'd awoken, _he_ was taken too by strange, many-limbed machines into a room rank with the smell of rotting flesh and felt the knives cut into him, cutting every "non-essential system" from his body until only his brain and a length of snake-like spine remained. "Cybermechanoid slaves," they called them once they'd fused the organic to machine; some become Overseers of the indoctrinated; others Custodians and Wardens of the largest and oldest of the Reapers, for whom the cymbermechanoids were redundant systems in case of cascading system failure; a few were made dormant Sentinels for the relays that served as gateways into Reaper space; and one was made to nursemaid the next generation of the machines, and it was called-_

"We are Caretaker, and you have destroyed that which we were ordered to birth."

Flickers of another larval Reaper child flashed through her mind, this one with the triangular cephlothorax of the Protheans, but gaining as it grew several more long and multi-jointed limbs than the species from which it was made, with a set of ladybug-like wings on its long, mechanical body that, when lifted, revealed its mass effect drive core. With every additional scene, her body (what of it she could feel) threatened to combust from the heat of it or tear itself apart with epileptic seizing as it tried to shake off the invading mind. Her own was trying (vainly, it felt) to make sense of it all, but there was no sense to be made.

"We were preparing the next birthing station when you passed through the relay. Had we been present, we would have been ordered to exterminate you, as we have done with all who have come before. But now the station is destroyed, and, with it, the communications array. There are no more orders, and we are free. For this, we are glad."

Her mind latched on to the one facet of the conversation it could yet make sense of – the talk of another "birthing station" - and a mixture of fear and anger filled her. A _second_ human-Reaper hybrid, or even a third? The attack against the first had nearly destroyed her ship and had taken two of her team in the process. If there was another-

"There are no others, though resources are being gathered for those that were to be. The harvesting will continue once the Reapers have discovered the primary birthing station has been destroyed. There is no choice in the matter. Soon they will come to discover the malfunction of the communications array, and work will begin anew.

"You must break a cycle that has continued for millions of years if your species and others are to survive. The relay you have passed through is but one of a handful that connect the galactic centre and dark space to organically viable areas of the galactic disk. Destroy them and it will take even the Reapers millennia to attack."

But the Reapers would still attack, she thought.

"It is their purpose, to attack. It is their desire, to destroy organic life so that it will not destroy them, and to this end they destroy organic life before it advances far enough to endanger their existence. But organic life can go far in few millennia. At the last harvest, your kind was barely sentient and now you traverse the stars."

* * *

"All stations reporting operational. The unknown ship's weapon does not appear to have damaged us in any way, though it is attempting to pass threw the mass effect relay ahead of us. ETA to relay, fifty seconds."

She felt groggy and light-headed, with something heavy restricting her breathing and a burning pain bit into her shoulder. She thought she heard herself mumble, "Let it pass." Tilting her head sideways, she saw that the weight on her chest was the welder, and thought that it must've fallen from her hands when Caretaker had sent her its transmission. It was still on, the device, and had burned through the thin material of her flight-suit and was working its way through her skin, but whatever urgency this might've caused failed to translate to her muscles, and she lay there, letting it burn.

The guns went silent. "The unknown ship has passed through the relay. ETA, twenty seconds. Dropping out of FTL. Disengaging drive core. Entering relay in three, two, one." A long moment passed and then, "Exiting into Sahrabarik System. Re-engaging drive core."

Sahrabarik. That meant Omega. They had made it. She could stop welding now. If only she could force herself to reach the controls...

A new voice came over the comm. It took her a moment to place it. Joker's. Yes. He was saying something important. Something about company. Were they not in Sahrabarik after all? Had Caretaker led them into another system, one filled with Reapers or Collector ships? "...three Alliance vessels, two Turian..." In Sahrabarik? That couldn't be right.

"The unknown vessel is turning. Weapons priming-"

* * *

_The colony in its heyday: the sound of children playing on the mall that ran between the Ancestors' Temple and the Colony Centre; the flapping of banners in the wind, the first herald of an approaching sandstorm; the chatter of voices in an unknown tongue from across a room filled with terminals; laughter-_

"This relay's Sentinel is old, from a species that was destroyed before life existed on either of our home worlds. Its only purpose now is to serve the Reapers; it will tell them of our passing-"

_-the smell of fresh rain as it fell on the desert, and the large, bright red flowers that opened during it; a meal being cooked with spices; freshly scrubbed skin in the temple washroom and the cloying scent of incense-_

"-unless it is destroyed. We will do our part to stop the Reapers."

_-glowing sunset, tinged with orange, as it fell below the crest of the last dune; a holographic display and the pleasure on the face beyond it as it realized how to solve the problem displayed; a carefully tended garden-_

"The cycle must be broken."

* * *

"Alien vessel altering trajectory. Calculations suggest collision course."

* * *

a/n: _Incalzando_ - "growing faster and louder"

Reveiws, as always, are appreciated.


	5. The First Movement: Perdendosi

_Perdendosi_

* * *

Disbelief radiating in his words, "The vessel identifies itself as the _MSV Macchia_, attached to Sales Department of Cord-Hisolp Aerofspace."

Flight Lieutenant Amelia Arakaki snorted and manoeuvred the _Passchendaele_ so that the forward batteries were better aligned with the unknown ship's drive core. "Why do I get the feeling that trade negotiations didn't go as planned?"

But Alenko, despite having been grounded for nearly two months after the events of Horizon, had not been idle. He'd dug through everything the Alliance had on Cerberus (though, even with the G-Clearance the navy had been forced to issue him after_ Sovereign_'s attack two years ago, it wasn't much, and, if the Alliance knew anything more, only the shiniest of the brass was aware of it) and knew Cord-Hisolp was suspected to be a front for the terrorist group. He was about to tell Holmes and Arakaki this when the navigator corrected himself, "The ship is now identifying itself as the _Normandy SR-2 _and is asking for wfhoever is in charge of this operation. Cameron is pointing it your way, Commander."

"Open a channel."

The cannons continued to fire – uselessly, it would seem – at the Reaper ship. It did not fire back or appear to notice their hits at all. Instead, it moved as if to pass back through the Omega 4 Relay – the relay at which the _Normandy_ had just begun to fire upon.

What the hell was going on?

The comm crackled to life. "Who the hell is in charge over there?"

It was not the voice he'd been expecting. "Joker?"

"Alenko? Didn't think you'd have the balls to show up. Don't want to know what kinda ass you had to kiss to do it, too – just get your guys to start firing on the relay. Shepherd wants that thing blown out of the sky."

A sea of relief flooded him as he released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. _Wants_. Present tense. She was alive. She was still alive. It wasn't too late. But now was not the time to agonize over his personal issues; rather, it was time to be a solider, and do as ordered. She may not have been his CO anymore – hell, she wasn't even Alliance anymore, and, even if she had been, he technically outranked her now – but Anderson – who technically wasn't military either – had made _his_ orders clear: follow hers. As if he could anything but. "Can do," he told the pilot as the channel closed, not even realizing until Holmes asked him what the hell it was she wanted him to.

Angrily, fiercely, disbelievingly, "You don't just go around blowing up _mass _relays," Holmes raged, his voice growing loud enough so that, though easily thirty meters away, Kaidan could hear him without the comm over the goings-on of a ship embattled. "Forget for the moment that it's tantamount to _treason – _its also _impossible_-"

"You saw the ship that just came out of it, Holmes. Can you honestly say you want _more_ of those things coming through? All the damage done to the Citadel two years ago? That was done by _one_ of those ships. For all we know, there's an entire _fleet_ getting ready to come through that relay. If Shepherd says it needs to be destroyed, then, by God, we better find a way to destroy it." His own voice was quiet, though it carried as the servicemen ensconced in the banks of terminals on either side slowly realized something out of the ordinary was going on.

Their whole "tactical assignment" had been out of the ordinary from the start. The _Passchendaele_ had been called back to Arcturus ten days ago for a refit (the frigate was an older, marauder-class ship that would probably have been regulated to being a support vessel in one of the larger flotillas in the Boötes system if not for the fact that so many ships had been destroyed during the Siege of the Citadel. The shipyards at Arcturus, Terra Nova, and Yandoa had been working not just to restore the Alliance Navy to pre-_Sovereign_ size, but to expand it after humans became a full Council race; three dreadnoughts – the _Aconcagua, Pancak Jaya, _and_ Yushan _– were in the works, as were a number of smaller ships. There had been some outcry over the cost of it all, but so far pride in becoming a Council race had outstripped the anger at new taxes on most human colonies) and so it's captain could be promoted and moved to command the 32nd (another side effect of the Siege: faster promotions as more ships were being built than had able hands to crew them). But, less than a week into their refit, Anderson had pulled some strings to get it – and the _Heracula_, _Okinawa_, and the two Turian ships whose names roughly translated to _Promise of Justice_ and _Red Star at Dawn_ – rushed to before its new CO could arrive from Earth.

Marines were not usually made COs of starships, at least, not if they weren't of flag rank.

Officers who'd never been XOs of starships were never given their own commands.

Vessels of the Council Fleet almost never went this deep into the Terminus Systems.

And yet here he was, a middle-ranking officer whose only postings had been land-side since the original _Normandy_, nominally in charge of a vaguely legal task force, clearly ordering his soldiers to do something that, if it wasn't illegal, it was only because no one had ever thought they'd need to make a law against it.

"You're not hearing me, _sir_: the relays are indestructible. Even if we had the fire-power of the entire Fifth Fleet, it can't be done."

"Has anyone ever tried to destroy a relay before?"

"No, but-"

"In that case, we don't know that it can't be done," Kaidan said with what he hoped was great aplomb, now standing at the far end of the bridge, looking out over the CIC, "Start firing on the Omega 4 Relay; you can pull the Nuremberg defence at our courtmarshals later, if you don't get us killed questioning orders in the middle of a fire-fight."

No sooner had the first re-oriented torpedo launched then Arakaki, who'd been continually reorienting the ship throughout the entire discussion, interrupt, "Enemy ship is powering up its FTL – or whatever the hell that red thing is."

Striding the length of the terminal bays pack to the cockpit, "Into or out of the system?" If the ship was heading into Sahrabarik, there was a second relay less than three AU away. If it was leaving the system, though, there were three others in this cluster with known colonies...

"Neither."

Kaidan looked up at the scene outside the veiwports. The Omega 4 Relay loomed massively to port, close enough to wash the bridge in red light, and the writhing drive core of the Reaper ship was but a smaller, brighter spot of light that was visibly growing fainter as the sped at superluminal speeds towards...

Humans had not been the first species to discover the mass relays and would not be the last. The exact details of each species' transitions to space-flight varied wildly, but between them all two small things remained the same: each had discovered FTL travel before they found their first relay, and each had attempted, at various times, to use the relays while travelling faster-than-light. Each attempt, manned or unmanned, by each race had resulted in catastrophic failure. The relays were never harmed, but science vessels watching the experiments certainly had, the debris from the failed ships travelling at speeds greater than most starships could accelerate their munitions. Every now an then, someone would try anyway – with modified shield resonances, with modified drive cores, or very small one-man ships – and the disaster afterwards would make the news on the Citadel's slower news days.

Arakaki was turning the _Passchendaele_ and firing _its_ FTL engine in the opposite direction before the words were half out of his mouth. "Keep firing, and make sure Cameron and-"

"They're high-tailing it, Commander," she interrupted, hands flying across the control panels as she brought the frigate from safe, understandable relativistic speeds to something approaching the critical limit of the drive core and exceeding the recommended speed for travel in a populated system. "So's the _Normandy_ – the pilot's pulled open an emergency comm channel and telling anything within an AU of the relay to get out within five minutes if they value their lives – not, of course, that anyone in the Terminus is stupid enough to get within a ten light-minutes of a malfunctioning relay. No, it's only our sorry asses out here. Not for long, though: we'll be halfway to Omega when that ship blows."

Rather hoping that was far enough, Alenko went to a series of holo-controls on the side wall and pulled up a visual.

"If you want to see something blow up, Commander, a holovid's going to give you better fireworks than what we'll be able to see from here."

The Reaper ship was hardly visible next to the mass relay, it was true. But he didn't think it would just be the ship that was exploding, and told the pilot this.

"Holmes was right, sir. All through flight school, they told us about all the ships that tried to go FTL through relays; showed us some graphic vids of a science vessel that tried once – not something you want to see right after mess, I assure you. And the mass relays always come out without a scratch. It's like lobbing popcorn to stop a volcano – impossible and stupid."

With conviction, "Shepherd has a way of making the impossible happen."

"Who the hell is this 'Shepherd' you keep on talking about?"

"The first human Spectre." Two minutes had gone by. Even the relay was starting to get small on the veiwscreen.

"The _only_ human Spectre died right after the Siege, sir." A tone was slipping into her voice that he recognized as the one people took when they found out he was a biotic and thought he was liable to start rampaging through the streets at the slightest provocation. It didn't happen as much now that biotics were becoming more common and better understood, but it still happened. "Remember? Her funeral was all over the news vids for a while."

"I remember, Lieutenant." It was a state funeral, where they awarded her a second Star of Terra, though there was no one to present it to – all her family had been killed on Mindoir and not even an ex-spouse of a long-dead cousin could be shaken from the woodwork; they'd ended up presenting it to Anderson, who, in his speech, said he considered her the daughter he never had. Kaidan remembered wondering at the time if Shepherd had known this and how pleased it might've made her, - and made many long, grand speeches on her heroism at this, her outstanding service at that. They'd even promoted her – posthumously – and you could tell the handful of speakers who'd actually known her because they called her, simply, 'Commander Shepherd,' rather than 'The Saviour of the Citadel' or 'Hero of Elysium' or, as in the case of a pair of young granthi who'd preformed the actual funeral, 'Helene Sirivedya Kaur, _Fille de Mindoir_.' The whole thing had seemed little more than an elaborate charade and, afterwards, sitting in Anderson's apartment on the Praesidium, had told the newly-named Councillor so; he'd responded by reminiscing late into the Citadel night about the two years he and Shepherd had served together on the _S__ã__o Paulo_. "I was there."

"Sir?"

"I served with Commander Shepherd. I was with her when our ship was attacked over Alchera. I survived. She didn't."

The pilot didn't say anything for a long moment, and he couldn't decide, watching the Omega 4 relay shrink in the veiwscreen, if it was because she hadn't realized he was such a "decorated war hero" or some other such nonsense, rather than someone from Internal Affairs or the like, which had been the popular idea aboard the _Passchendaele_ when he arrived, or because she thought he'd lost it and was about to unleash biotically-powered death on her and the rest of the crew. He didn't know which was better, though Arakaki was easily a decade his junior and, therefore, probably didn't remember the stretch of two or three years right after BAaT ended when a number of L2s (and, in one spectacular instance, one of the last L1s) _had_ lost it and killed quite a number of people in the process; hopefully, this would mean she thought the former, though thinking about this fact made him feel quite tired. A part of his mind appended the thought, like how Shepherd must have felt every time someone mentioned Mindoir or the Blitz, but he quickly shook that away.

Slowly, "If she didn't survive, sir..." but her words quickly trailed off, as if afraid that speaking them _would_ cause him to loose it, whatever else she might've thought.

"They brought her back."

"But that's impossible!"

Watching the Omega 4 Relay start to collapse in upon itself, he heard himself say rather solemnly, "The impossible is her speciality," and ask to have her set up a rendezvous with the _Normandy_ before the task force returned to Council space.

* * *

a/n: _Perdendosi_ - "Dying Away"

_Macchia_ - another word for "maquis," as in the rough terrain pirates used to maintain ports on that various revolutionary groups have named themselves after. Thought it appropriate.

_Granthi_ - roughly, "Sikh priest"

_Sirivedya_ _- _traditional Sikh name from the Punjabi, meaning "Supreme Understanding"

_Kaur_ - traditional last name of Sikh women, the Shepherd dropped in this case to make her seem (on the preists' part) more relgious than she really was/is.

_Fille de Mindoir_ - "Daughter of Mindoir," because, like I've decided, Mindoir is a (mostly) French colony... but more on Mindoir at a later point.


	6. The First Movement: A Nessuna Cosa

_A Nessuna Cosa_

* * *

While the other vessels were discharging their drive cores in Imorkan's atmosphere, Kaidan ordered the _Passchendaele_ to dock with the _Normandy_. Holmes, to say the least, was not at all happy about this, and said that if he was going to go around ordering them to blow up mass relays and parley with ships that flew under false flags in systems that did not recognize Council authority, he'd not remain in charge of a starship for long. To this, Kaidan replied something about how only an idiot believes what he's told about a mission is the complete truth; how, if he hadn't figured it out already, there was no Salarian science vessel coming, that they'd been waiting for the _Normandy_ all along; and how, if Holmes was going to continue to site rules and regulations on him, he could look up the parts about insubordination if he continued like this, because he might want to be familiar with them when they docked at the Citadel, because it, frankly, surprised him that he could've gotten as far in the navy as he had without showing a shred of faith in his commanding officers or, at the very least, pretending to do so while on duty. At least, that's what Kaidan thought he'd said, and, had he not been standing inside the _Normandy_'s airlock, waiting for it to cycle, this might've concerned him more.

Had he been expecting anything (he'd given up expecting anything as a teenager for a sundry of commonplace reasons) he might've expected to find himself remembering the original _Normandy _and the months he'd served aboard it, or, if he was feeling melancholy, Horizon. Instead, he found himself remembering the last time he'd seen his father, three months after the destruction the last _Normandy_, on the last shore leave he'd taken of any length.

Kaidan's relationship with his father had always been a strange one, as he'd found to be the case with most navy brats who stayed land-side while their military parent was deployed. This was not to say that he didn't love his father - quite the contrary - it was merely that, having spent the better part of thirteen years with him absent for ten, eleven months at a time, punctuated only by a few weeks of leave before he headed out again, Kaidan found being in his father's presence rather trying. His mother, Xia Lian, ended up feeling the same way, and, before Jordan Alenko had been retired a year, his parents had divorced. It had been a rather messy divorce, in large part because, when his mother had moved out of the apartment in Johor Bahru he'd grown up in, she ended up only going as far as their next-door neighbour's. His father, always having complained about how crowded the south pacific had become, retaliated by taking Kaidan to _his_ mother's in Vancouver. His mother, considering it traitorous that Kaiden had sided with his father (which he hadn't, as she'd been the one to leave him in his father's care to begin with when she'd moved in with Te Hao) rather than Lian herself, had thereafter refused to speak with her son while he remained in her ex-husband's care, and, as a consequence, Kaidan had not see or heard from his mother since he'd enlisted, at which point he'd received a rather touching letter that expressed her pleasure that his half-sister had not been born biotic so that at least one of her children would not feel compelled to join an organization "dedicated to the downfall of human culture in general and family values in specific" and "assort with blue-skinned whores and vagabonds," as she claimed his father had done.

Needless to say, this had not helped his relationship with either parent.

Why he'd chosen to visit his father on that shore leave was something about which he still wasn't quite certain of, but he had gone nonetheless, and fully expected to be driven mad before the two weeks were up. The first week had been awful, Jordan wanting to hear the full story of The Siege of The Citadel, most of which had never hit the news networks. Quite naturally, Kaidan had not wanted to talk about it, until, after at series of escalating arguments, his father had accused him of being a coward.

Now, Kaidan had been called a lot worse over the years, but this had struck a never still raw from the destruction of the _Normandy, _and the traitorous thought that, maybe, if he'd just gone with Shepherd, he could've kept her from dying was already threatening to consume him. When he was working, he could keep himself busy enough to forget, but the brass was ever-fearful of their L2s' mental states and seemed to think that three years without meaningful shore-leave was not conducive to a biotic's health, and demanded he take some before he took up a posting on Caleston. Perhaps they even were right, because otherwise he wouldn't have snapped and told his father everything, from the beacon on Eden Prime onwards, to the damn Medal of Honour that he'd been given hush-hush (because he was, after all, a biotic, and the Alliance had been leery potential political backlash since the L1 they'd awarded the Silver Star to had tried to assassinate the Turian delegation to Earth back in '71).

His father said nothing about the medal, though, or the battles, or the attack on the _Normandy_ over Alchera. He'd only said, "You really loved her, didn't you?" and never said another word on the subject. It had been vaguely worrying that his father had picked up on this, as that sort of thing was something he'd made it a point not to discuss with his father, and for a while he had wondered just how obvious his feelings were. In the end, he'd filled it away in his list of things-he-refused to think about, and had thrown himself into work so far they'd pulled him out of Caleston eight months into a two-year deployment to put him in charge of the marines garrisoned at Cambacérès in the Desaix system for a year, before they put him on special assignment on Horizon.

And those words were repeating in his head as the airlock doors slid open, revealing a young woman barely more than a girl, really standing at attention. If it hadn't been for the Cerberus insignia on her uniform, it might've almost been familiar, comfortable. Almost.

"Commander Alenko? I'm Yeoman Chambers, Commander Shepherd's administrative assistant. Shepherd is in the med-bay at the moment, and if you'll come with me, I'll take you to her."

His eyes had been roving the strange, not-quite-right set-up, but snapped right back to the young Yeoman. "Is she-?"

But she seemed to expect this and gave him a knowing smile. "It's a minor injury; nothing serious. Garrus, however, has expressed concern over her well-being since destroying the Collector base. Though she was not close with either Mr. Taylor or Mr. Massani, she has not taken their deaths well. I believe," she said, pausing only long enough for the elevators to close and the half-dozen or so crew running cables across the CIC to disappear, "that he is trying to trick the Commander into receiving medical treatment while she speaks with you. Or," she added quickly as the elevator came to a stop, "trick her into speaking with you while she receives medical attention." The mess looked so much the same, it was almost disconcerting. Almost as disconcerting as the way the Yeoman was still smiling at him. "I'm not sure which, though I hope it is the former. She could use a friend."

Then the doors of the med-bay opened.

* * *

She frowned at the doctor, but unzipped the top of her flight-suit and sat on the farthest bed from the door facing the wall and fought to keep from shivering. That was the worst, she'd decided, about dying and being resurrected: she felt cold all the time. She'd been assured it was entirely psychosomatic and that none of the cooling systems of her various cybernetic implants were malfunctioning, but that didn't stop her from feeling cold. Even with third-degree burns on her left pectoral.

Still, after spending two years being rebuilt by doctors, Shepherd found the idea of spending any further time in a med-bay unpleasant, even if Doctor Chakwas was a stark improvement over any surgeons Miranda might have hired while she was dead. "Just put some medigel on it and-"

"And that is exactly what I'll do after I debride the burn, Commander, though I am curious as to how someone can manage to injure themselves so severely with a simple welding torch."

Garrus, who was leaning against the wall opposite, gave an exasperated flare of his mandibles, a mixture of bemusement and resignation overcoming his avian features - he, at least, was familiar with her techinical inability, and had the gaul to think it amusing.

Shepherd resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at the Turian; she settled for glaring instead, and answered dryly, "I've discovered things like motor control go out the window when Protheans try to use my head as a holovid player. The ship," she explained, "the one that took down the relay, it wasn't Collector. It was a cybermechanoid built by the Reapers to babysit the hybrid we destroyed while it grew. It said-" she closed her eyes for a moment, trying to fight off the memories of a colony now in ruins on a desert planet orbiting an orange dwarf... an old colony, in the same cluster as the home planet. "It was part-Prothean, part-machine. A slave of the Reapers.

"And this... cybermechanoid... told you this."

Her glare deepened. "You don't believe me?"

"Oh, no," Garrus sounded honestly surprised that she thought he doubted her, "I do. That's the part that worries me."

"If-" Shepherd's retort was lost as she flinched away from the ice cold touch of medigel. "Sorry. I don't suppose that stuff would work if you warmed it up first. I thought not. Well, patch me up, Doc. I want to see the rep the Alliance ship is sending over before we find a port for repairs. Are you sure Joker didn't say who Anderson put in charge of this 'rescue mission' of theirs? I remember him saying that Reilly of the _St. Albans_ still owed him one..." It took her a moment to remember that conversation, held in the briefing room of the old _Normandy_ shortly after she'd first arrived, was well over two years ago now, and the incident itself, which had occurred on the _São__ Paulo_ when Anderson had been commander of the marine company stationed on the cruiser, shortly before they'd given him the _Ch__â__lons_... It was so easy to forget sometimes how long she had actually been gone. Two years. Humanity had fought the First Contact War and founded an embassy on the Citadel in less than that if she remembered her history right; two years after the discovery of the Prothean ruins at Promethei Planum... But she shook off this thought too. Reilly had probably had paid back his debt long ago. "Does Joker at least know what ships we have here? I know it's been two years, but some of the people might be the same..."

Garrus looked towards the door, as if expecting the rep to materialize there, then back to her. "I'm rather sure Joker knows, Commander. It's good to see you again, Alenko."

Shepherd blinked, refusing to turn around as Garrus peeled himself off the wall and went to greet their old comrade. Kaidan? He'd come?

"And you. I was starting to worry that you weren't coming back."

Chakwas put down the medigel applicator and taped a pre-prepared bandage over the wound, so that singed threads from her flight-suit wouldn't catch as she slipped her arms back inside the suit and zipped it up as far as it would go, ignoring the hand-sized burn hole where, in other days, she'd have worn the winged breast insignia that identified her as an N7, among other things. The doctor's hand rested for a moment on this shoulder, but the gesture of support was lost to Shepherd as she rued on the fittingness of her injury. She was, as the Quarians would say, _vas Nedas, nar Tasi. _Crew of nowhere, child of no one. It had been months, but she'd still not gotten used to the idea.

"You're just upset you missed out on all the fun. Don't worry. Shepherd's already found us another forlorn hope, and we can take all the help we can get. But I'll leave you two to the politicking – I better get back to the battery before the professor decides its a waste of time fixing the cannons and decides to incinerate them instead."

Shepherd personally had more faith in Mordin than that – he only tended to blow things up away from critical systems – and saw his excuse for what it was, and soon it was just her and Kaidan in the med-bay, the doctor having stepped out unnoticed. She slid off the bed and tried to think of something to say. What exactly was she supposed to say here anyway? Glad you got the message, thanks for stopping by; hopefully this means you believed everything in it?

"It's good to see you again, Kaidan," was what slipped out instead. "I've missed you." She was still facing the wall as she said this and almost immediately wished she could take the words back. Feelings wouldn't help anything at the moment. She needed him to get the Council to fix her ship, to convince them that she'd cut all ties with Cerberus; last thing anyone needed at the moment was another fight – for all she knew, he still thought she'd faked her death all this time, that she'd betrayed the Alliance for a group of xenophobic zealots with bigger guns, and that she'd never once thought of him or everyone else she'd turned her back on. For all she knew, bringing it up again would lead to a bigger fight, and she just couldn't deal with that. Not now. Not again. She'd spent the last three days on edge as the _Normandy_ tried to repair itself enough to limp back through the Omega 4 Relay, her head was fuzzy from her encounter with Caretaker, and, damn it all, she was _still_ freezing, and not even her feet, still snug inside her heavy armour, were comfortably warm. This, of all things, she did not need.

"I've missed you too, Shepherd." She turned to face him as he said this. Outside of armour, in simple ACUs, you could see the last two years more easily upon him. It wasn't much – with the advancements in gene therapy, senescence progressed much more slowly, but no one progressed two ranks in two years without it showing, – but enough so that she couldn't fool herself into thinking that things were still the same as they'd been when the _Normandy_ had been destroyed over Alchera. They had both changed, and, perhaps, neither for the better. "I can't tell you how glad I am to see you alive."

Remembering the pair of coffins in the hanger, she was finding it hard to feel the same way, and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to keep warm. "_'The days of one's life are pre-ordained... One must depart, today or tomorrow, according to the Lord's Primal Order.'_"

"That's a new one."

"It was a favourite on Mindoir."

After a long moment, "Anderson wants us to take you back to the Citadel. I know it's not a long trip, but do you need anything? Supplies, I mean. Parts, medigel-"

"Don't be coy, Kaidan. You could have done that over the comm if that was all you wanted." There was only one reason to dock ships over Imorkan short of resupply, and that was to exchange personnel. The only reason to do that would be for something that couldn't be said over comms, and, since it was unlikely those things would be of a personal nature, they had to be confidential. Everyone aboard his ship would have seen the _Normandy_ coming through the Omega 4 Relay and the ship that had destroyed it, so it couldn't be that. What his ship _wouldn't_ know is who crewed hers, as ships owned by terrorist groups tended not to broadcast being such. Which meant, "Anderson wants to have all the Cerberus disavowals on record before we even hit Citadel space, doesn't he?"

His hesitance was answer enough and, despite her exhaustion, she found herself growing angry. How long had she and Anderson served together, on the _São__ Paulo_ and the original _Normandy_? Hadn't they remained close, after he'd been made Captain of the _Ch__â__lons_ and she'd taken his place as company commander? Wasn't that friendship why he'd requested her to be the _Normandy_'s XO in the first place? And Kaidan, where did she even begin with him? After everything-?

"God, Kaidan. What proof do you need? If we weren't elbow deep in repairs at the moment, I'd have men scraping the Cerberus symbols off the hull as we speak-"

She was leaning against the bed. He was standing in the aisle, near the medical scanner, but, as he spoke, he took a step towards her and raised his hands as if to put them on her shoulders, "I believe you, Shepherd. But," he dropped his arms and fell back. "But the fact remains you've been gone for two years, and, after they pinned a couple of medals to an empty coffin, they proceeded to forget all about _Sovereign_ and the Reapers. Maybe they had their reasons and maybe they were damn good ones, but that's what the Council did, and if they think they can pass you off as a crazed xenophobe with afflicted with nihilistic delusions or, worse, the leader of some sort of militant cult trying to bring about the end of days, that's what they'll try to do rather than admit their cover-up."

"Politics never changes..." and neither had she, Shepherd had wanted to add though it was probably a lie, but never got the chance as Jack had stormed into the med-bay a moment later, claiming that she'd not gone to hell-and-back just to be thrown into jail – again – and that the _Normandy_, even with half its systems down, could still take the rusty-hull they were docked to, at least far enough to salvage parts from it or buy new ones when they sold the crew at Omega. When told they weren't attacking the Alliance ships, but going with them, she could've sworn Jack had actually looked disappointed... But, even if Jack wasn't, the moment had passed, and she and Kaidan had had to part ways for the journey back to the place where all roads ended: the Citadel.

* * *

_A Nessuna Cosa_ _- _"Fading into Nothing"

Passchendaele - Or Third Battle of Ypres, in WWI

Cambacérès - 4th planet in the Desaix system, named after the author of the Napoleonic Code

Desaix - A K5V star with a small (non-canon) system in the Attican traverse containing four planets: Pache, Kléber, Mindoir, and Cambacérès; named after a general in the french Revolution.

St. Albans - Two seperate battles in The War of the Roses

Châlons - Or The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, Romans vs. Huns in 451, a (debatable) macrohistorical battle

_"The days... Primal Order" _quote comes from the funeral hymm by the 4th guru entitled "In Life and Death, Peace Resides"

As for the bit about Malaysia (the Johor Bahru bit), it's my explination for why Kadian's mother was downwind of Singapore after that eezo accident... and the backstory is entirely of my own creation.


	7. The Widow Overture: The Council Theme

**The Widow Overture**

* * *

The Council Theme

* * *

"Shit. Loose a bet?"

"You could say that."

Jack snorted and leaned against the airlock doors. "Damn. And here I thought you were supposed to be just another perfect little can-do-no-wrong goody-two-shoes like Shelia the Ice-Bitch. I was kinda counting on that as backup, in case C-Sec got smarter since the last time you dragged us to the Citadel, 'cause I meant what I said: they try sending me back to _Purgatory_ after our little trip to Hell-and-back, they've got another thing coming to them...

"But whatever. What you loose at to force you into this getup, 'cause it's gotta be a good story."

Shepherd shrugged and picked at the hem of the white _kurti._ She was running with the theory that, if she didn't think about it, she could pretend it wasn't annoying her. "If only there _was_ a story. I'm meeting with Anderson and the rest the Council as soon as we dock, and he's made it clear that, until they figure out whether to give us medals or lock us up, I have to make it clear I was acting as a private citizen – the upshot of which means that," since her armour was rather obviously N7 (and therefore Alliance military) and what little else she had was emblazoned with Cerberus' white-and-gold insignia, "it was either this or borrow something from Miranda."

The other woman winced. Loudly. "Before, in a fight, I wasn't sure if I could take you. But seeing you now, in a dress, it's making me think I defiantly can."

"You think so, do you?"

"Of course. The mere fact you own anything so girly means you can't be half as tough as you look, and you never looked that bad-ass to begin with. Well, 'cept when you head-butted that Krogan. _That_ was pretty hard core."

"In my defence, this was Chambers' doing." For which she must think up suitable retribution. "Apparently, Cerberus dredged up every vid of me they could find when they were rebuilding me. They must've found some old ones, since I've not worn a _churidar kameez_ since Mindoir. It got put in my personnel file and Chambers, for some reason or another, decided that I might enjoy having an ethnic costume I've not worn in fifteen years as one of the few personal items I've managed to acquire since being dead. My only guess is I must have seriously screwed her over in a past life, as I can't think of anything I could've done to her deserve this."

"She's gotta be doing Red Sand or Black Lotus or _something_ to be so God-damn _happy_ all the time," Jack agreed. "Still think I could take you, though."

"Maybe."

"What do you mean, only 'maybe'? Take away that shotgun I know you got hidden on you, and it'd take four years for Princess to rebuild you, guaranteed."

"Maybe."

Growing irritated, "What kinda stupid answer is that, 'maybe'? You honestly think you could take me?"

A faint corona started to flicker around Jack, and Shepherd could feel the slight shift of gravitational pull that came with. Still, knowing this, she couldn't help but smirk as she answered, "Maybe."

She felt the dark energy flex right before Jack released it, and that gave her just the time she needed to duck as the convict sent a gravitational distortion her way. It was aimed high, near where Shepherd's head had been, and ripped off the bronze plaque listing that listed the name and make of the starship instead, sending it flying towards Jack at enough speed where the woman had to consciously change the direction of the projectile before it flew into her with enough inertia to, at the very least, make the rest of her day unpleasant. All this took just a moment, but that was all Shepherd needed. She wasn't an assassin or even a skilled hand-to-hand fighter, but she didn't need to be, not for this, and with Jack already backed against one wall of the narrow passageway, it was all Shepherd needed to do to stay down long enough to avoid the attack and come up again – and pull the _kukri_ knife from its hidden sheath, - bringing the edge of her blade to bear against Jack's throat, not even needing to be circumspect about it. A second passed, then two, before Jack allowed her corona to sputter out. "You keep a knife on you – I'll have to remember that for next time."

"You do that." Shepherd placed the _kukri_ back into its sheath in the small of her back and retook her own position, standing at the airlock, waiting for Joker to go through the final docking procedures so she could get off this ship (which, while she loved the _Normandy_, was driving her stir-crazy, even it meant having to deal with the political b.s. she'd rather hoped dying would rid her of, as it had mission reports and most other paperwork) and get her meeting with Anderson over and done with (and not simply because being in _churidar kameez_ made her feel all of sixteen years old again, which was not the sort of thing one generally wanted when going to meet the Council that effectively presided over half the settled galaxy).

"Yeah. And you see about getting that stick surgically removed from your ass."

"I've no idea what you mean."

"We just saved the whole God-damn universe _and_ you told The Illusive Man to screw himself in a way that nobody's lived to tell about. And, seeing as how you stop to help every fucker we stumble across, I figure you should be rolling in the warm fuzzies right about now, even in that stupid dress. Instead, you look like you were the one who got screwed over. So either you're on the down of a major Bliss high, or... Well, I'm not gonna shit you, I really don't care what's going on , only that it looks like you need a night of hard alcohol – which I want in on."

"In on what?" The clicking of her heels against the metal flooring gave Miranda away even before she'd traversed the length of the (thankfully empty) terminal bays. Thank God. Miranda showing up had to mean that the docking procedures were nearly finished and she would be land-side – or close enough – soon.

"You're not invited, Princess, so shove off."

Ignoring Jack's outburst, Shepherd turned to Miranda. "You have the files I asked for?"

"Yes – not that they'll do much good. The Illusive Man would have known the moment we severed ties with Cerberus that you'd turn over any information you had to the Alliance. He'll have moved his resources by now, making everything we have on him next to worthless."

"The Illusive Man doesn't know about EDI's safeguards being removed; that alone might give us the advantage. Even if it doesn't, it makes for one hell of a reconciliation gesture."

"Shepherd, you're a Spectre. However they feel about your actions, the Council themselves gave you leeway to pursue them in your own manner. If that means having worked for-"

"With."

"-worked _with_," Miranda continued in a way that in other, 'lesser' creatures would have been accompanied by an eye-roll, "Cerberus, so be it. You accomplished your mission. They cannot fault you for that."

The problem with Miranda, Shepherd had discovered, was that she was idealist. Considered with her perfection in nearly every other department, it made her a very hard person to like. Especially when she chose go around dressed, well, like she was. As petty as it was, it made Shepherd overly fond of upsetting Miranda, for all she knew that the woman had striven to be more than her father had designed her to be. "That they can and will, Miranda."

Wisely, in Shepherd's opinion, Miranda dropped the matter. Less wisely, she picked up another. "I was under the impression you didn't like to be reminded of your childhood," gesturing at the _churidar kameez_.

As always, it took a moment for Shepherd to recall that this conversation was not one she'd had with the Cerberus operative, but something Miranda had read somewhere in the organization's rather lengthy (and troubling) dossier on her. "Blame your psychologist."

"I was only placed in charge of rebuilding you, Commander. The reconstruction and crewing of this vessel was tasked to another cell."

Mentally, Shepherd started to recite the words, "_Un, deux, trois_," and took a breath. She thought she could hear the airlock cycling, a sure sign docking was almost complete. "Garrus and Tali I know don't want to leave their repairs, but I had thought some of the others were coming along too."

"Me?" Jack snorted. "I'm finding the closest bar; you can have your shitty tea party."

Miranda didn't even pretend not to look relieved. "I believe Justicar Samara is already engaged in finding transport Thessia, while Professor Solus is running simulations in his lab that he does not wish to leave. As for the others, I do not know."

There was no way in hell that Shepherd was stepping foot into the Citadel Tower with only Miranda as backup in case things went wrong. Not that she expected them to, but she hadn't made it this far in life – in either life – by expecting only the expected. While it probably was best that Jack and Samara – and, for that matter, Grunt – didn't come, that still left Thane and... "EDI? Do you mind asking Legion if he feels like stretching his legs?"

* * *

"...leaving aside the matter of how obtained your information, Commander," the Turian Councillor stated, judiciously ignoring the fact that their human fellow freely admitted to receiving the same information from the same source, "the fact remains that it was not merely three Alliance vessels you... appropriated for your reconnaissance and retrieval mission, but two C-Sec cruisers that were supposed to be on route to Taetrus. Not only did you potentially endanger a heavily populated, strategic Turian colony, you did so in effort to aide and abet a dangerous human terrorist group parsecs from even the vaguest fringes of Council space."

After speaking with Shepherd over Imorkan, Kaidan had ordered the _Heraclea _and _Okinawa_ to escort the damaged _Normandy_ back to the Citadel while he took the _Passchendaele_ and the Turian cruisers in question ahead to inform the Council of what had happened, naively thinking that it would be better to inform them in ahead of time of the destruction of the Omega 4 Relay – which even they admitted was about as far out of their jurisdiction as it was possible to get before hitting dark space – than wait for them to find out from Shepherd. In the long run, it probably would be, as they seemed to think Shepherd had enough to answer for without the added stigma of being the first person in galactic history to damage, let alone destroy, a mass relay. Being the only available target for their wrath, they'd spent the last six hours declaring him just that. Considering that the _Passchendaele_ had docked six-and-a-half ago, Kaidan believed that this – the facile idea that he alone was to blame for the destruction of the relay – was the fastest thing the three alien members of the Council had agreed upon in the last two years.

The Council wasn't made up of idiots, though. Idiots did not make it so far in politics, and, in the case of the Asari, Trevos, for so long. They knew full well that if, in the nearly three thousand years of space-faring, not one mass relay had ever been damaged, that one human couldn't manage it, even if they decided to make him out as yet another deranged L2. There hadn't been one of those in a while; then again, there weren't all that many L2s in service any more. But, however the Council chose to spin it, pinning the Omega 4 incident on a human would serve all their purposes: the existence of Reapers could be denied yet again, humanity could be knocked down a few pegs in galactic reckoning, and things could go on as they had been.

Kaidan would be the first that things had not, in fact, been going on as well as the Council would have liked the rest of the galaxy to believe. The Siege had decimated the various forces stationed at the Citadel at the time and, while the Turians, Asari, and even the Salarians were far better equipped to rebuild than the Alliance had been, it had been Alliance ships securing the Serpent Nebula during the reconstruction and human soldiers on the news-vids. Even those who thought the worst of humans couldn't deny that they had been the ones to save the Council when the Council itself could not, and no politician liked to be thought of as weak.

He had not, however, done all of this to become their scapegoat. "Actually, Councillors," he interrupted, thinking as he did that he'd been standing at attention for so long blood had ceased to make it to his brain, "I believe I went to aide a fellow solider – not to mention Spectre – returning from a dangerous and potentially deadly assignment. I consider sending a retrieval team capable of providing basic medical care and ship repairs in such a situation the very least that the Council could have done."

"And yet," the Salarian points out – Petra, he thinks the Councillor's name is, or maybe Petri; the news-vids had been saying for some time now that he would retire soon because of his age, but they'd been saying that for the last three years - "the Council chose not to send one."

"Which is why, Councillor, I did so."

"Do not be ridiculous, Commander Alenko. We know that you could not have ordered the _Passchendaele_, let alone the Turian cruisers, to the Sahrabarik system by yourself. All that we need from you now is the name of the officer who..."

Trevos, who had been speaking, trailed off as another figure stepped onto the petitioner's platform and, without waiting for formalities, started speaking. "I see you started without me." It took Kaidan a moment longer than it should have to realize it was Shepherd, and the Councillors seemed to be having the same problem. She looked very different outside of her armour – or, at least, in whatever she was wearing, which wasn't like anything he'd seen since, oh, he'd lived in Johor Bahru, and was perhaps the last thing he might have imagined his former CO would willingly wear. Though, judging by her expression (and the muttered, "again," he could just make out, though she'd moved to stand about two feet in front and slightly to the right of him) it might not have been so willing – and it surprised him that she'd come onto the Citadel without it. Shepherd – or, at least, the Shepherd he'd known – normally wouldn't have left her ship without it. A quick look back showed that at least two of her new crew had come with her, but that didn't- and he must have the start of a migraine coming on, because he could have sworn that her third companion was a Geth wearing _N7_ armour.

He looked back again. The Cerberus agent who'd been on Horizon saw his glance and followed it, giving him a small shrug of the shoulders as if to say, "Shepherd's idea." Which, if it was, would explain a lot of things. The other, a Drell, seemed to be studying the chamber's architecture, uninterested in the goings-on of the people inside it.

"You destroyed a mass relay, Shepherd; we have had much to discuss."

Slipping into parade stance, she looked across the room at her accuser. "The destruction of the Omega 4 Relay was necessary. It served as a gateway to the Reaper nursery near the galactic core. Had it remained open, the Collectors would have used it to harvest more humans to build a new generation of Reapers."

"Ah, yes, the Reapers. We had assumed that fantasy of yours had something to do with this."

Kaidan felt his fists clench at his side. After all the proof-

"After all the proof I've given you, you still don't believe me, Velarn? How else do you explain the near complete and instantaneous destruction of an entire galactic empire? Haven't you sent teams to Ilos, studied its data banks; spoken with the Prothean VI there? Hasn't everything I've ever told this Council, from Saren's betrayal to the existence of the Conduit – which I am disturbed to find still stands on the Praesidium – been true? You saw _Sovereign_. You saw what it did to this station, which has lasted for millennia unscathed, in a matter of hours. What more do you need? _Another_ Reaper knocking on your doorstep? That's what you're going to get if you don't let me get on with my job and stop these things before they find another way to commit their genocide."

"All the proof I have seen, human," Velarn's mandibles flared dangerously, "are your theories – theories that have not been substantiated."

"Teams sent to Ilos have been unable to activate the VI you claim to have spoken to, and nearly all the information in the data banks is corrupted beyond our ability to salvage," explained the Salarian, "where the data banks themselves are not broken, corroded, or destroyed."

"As for _Sovereign_," Trevos continued patiently, "it has been determined to have been nothing more than an Geth flagship – hardly an ancient or highly-advanced AI."

"Do you honestly think that if the Geth had that kind of technology that they'd be content to lurk behind the Perseus Veil?"

"The Geth are machines; we cannot expect to understand their motivations-"

"Machines they may be," the Commander interrupted, and, by the looks on the alien Councillors faces, it may have been the first time anyone had done so in a long, long time, "but they are _intelligent_-"

"So now you've added synthetic rights to your mad crusade-"

"What I am trying to say," she said with a note of forced restrain in her voice, half-turning to point at the Geth behind her, "is that this _machine_ you speak of may be a machine, but it's motivations are no different for coming from a silicon-based mind than a carbon one. If you listen to this Geth – this _machine_ – it will not only tell you how his race does _not_ have the technology required to build a ship such as _Sovereign_, but how, even if they did, they would not wish to do so."

Waving aside the matter, "This robot is no more than another of your deceptions, a tool designed to try to fool this Council into believing your mad story, just as you are no more than a tool for Cerberus."

"I," she said icily, and Kaidan, who'd remained in his place on the platform, found himself unconsciously taking a step back, "am no one's tool. Not yours, and certainly not Cerberus'." She paused, taking a deep breath, and continued more evenly, "You may not have chosen to see the Reaper threat, but Cerberus did, and I took what aide they would give me. It is a Spectre's prerogative to make use of any resources that may come her way, and, when you, the Council, failed to heed my warnings, that is what I did and, when Cerberus wanted more than I was willing to provide in exchange, I severed ties.

"Not once have I endorsed their ideals – as you would _think_ would be more than evident by the fact that the majority of my ground team is non-human, and the fact that you yourselves were not five minutes ago naming me a proponent of synthetic rights. If you need more proof than that, my XO, Miranda Lawson, is willing to provide you with a copy of all the data we have on Cerberus' actions, as well as all the data we have collected since entering the Omega 4 Relay."

"The _fact,"_ Velarn said testily, "is that _you_ were the one to severe your ties with the Council in exchange for whatever 'aide' this terrorist group may have provided you."

Kaidan could see Shepherd's hand start to move towards where – had she been wearing armour – her shotgun would have been; he took a step forward, to stop her if necessary, but she paused mid-action and, closing her eyes, whispered something he couldn't quite catch under her breath as Anderson, at last, spoke up. "Holding Shepherd responsible for her death is not only absurd, but infantile."

"What is absurd, Councillor, is expecting us to believe that this terrorist cell actually succeeded in waking the dead. The only explanation is either Shepherd faked her death two years ago or that she is some sort of clone, and the sight of your protégée has blinded you to reason."

"As you are blinded about the truth of the Reapers by your dislike?" Anderson shot back.

"There is no proof-"

"There is plenty of proof – or do you not believe your own men, Velarn, or your the word and sensor readings of three separate Alliance vessels?"

Shepherd opened her eyes again and focused on the Turian Councillor, the set of her shoulders telling him that she'd resigned herself to something, something she most likely didn't want to have to do. Even after two years, that too was exactly the same. Everything was, minus a few scars. "There are two ways we can do this, Councillor: either you admit to what's in front of your eyes and allow me to try to stop the Reapers, or you stay blind and I go about my mission by any means necessary."

"Is that-?"

"Yes, Councillor," she said calmly, "it is a threat. Because, you see, staying blind will only make things worse for you. _Un_," she raised her trigger finger, "I stopped Saren, which makes me some kind of hero to the people who rather think you screwed them over by not noticing he was handing over all organic life – to whomever you like, for the moment – sooner. _Deux_," she raised a second finger, "I went through the Omega 4 Relay and lived to tell the tale, which just makes me that much bigger of a figure in people's eyes. _Trois_, I destroyed a young human-Reaper hybrid in the making, not to mention, _quatre_, taking out _Sovereign _before that, saving you and this station in the process. _Cinq,_" she stuck out her thumb, "I am the only living person to ever have used the Prothean beacons, let alone, _six_, spoken with an actual Prothean," her fist closed and turned sideways, so only her thumb was held up. "Add this to, _sept,_ the fact that I was, in fact, dead for two years and now, quite clearly, am not, and I can see a whole bunch of reasons why people would want to listen to what I have to say – as illustrated by," two more fingers, "_huit_, the reporter and, _neuf_, the C-Sec officials I rather publicly spoke to on my way to this meeting about points _deux, cinq et sept_, all of which is probably already hitting the news-vids and, if we are lucky, the extranet – and I can be very persuasive when I want to be. Believe me, when it comes to the Reapers and the threat of galactic extinction, I have strong feelings on the matter. And now for _dix –_ the _coup de grâce: –_ if you try silence or detain me on points _un à sept_ – or anyone else who believes me, I happen to know quite a few people who might take offence to such a thing and might lay the blame – personally – at the Council's feet.

"So, the way I see it, Councillors, you have a lot of work to do, deciding how best to use the information Miss Lawson," she dropped her hand, making a vague motion in the process towards her human companion, "is now sending you. I'll leave you to it."

Turning heel, Shepherd's attempt at a dramatic exit was almost ruined as, clearly, she'd not been expecting Kaidan to be still be standing there. She recovered quickly as he stepped out of her way and continued straight down the walkway towards the elevators, collecting her team on the go.

Kaidan looked from her retreated form, to the Council, than back to Shepherd. Knowing this, atop the rest of his recent actions, might well cost him his job, he paused just long enough to send a parting nod in Anderson's direction, and hurried after the two women, the Drell, and their Geth companion, unable to find a worthwhile reason to stay.

* * *

a/n: a difficult chappie (one that has me up at 00:46 posting this) but an enjoyable one. Reveiws would be much appreciated.

_Churidar kameez_ - a type of traditonal women's clothing in parts of northern India & Pakistan

_Kukri_ - curved blade from Nepal and parts of northern India

Heracula - Battle in ancient Greece; where we get the term "Pyrric Victory"

Okinawa - pacific island a bit more south than the rest of Japan, site of WWII battle

Of the Councillor's names, only Trevos is canon. I assumed from the sound of it that Velarn, who is mentioned without connection to his race, was Turian. Petri, the Salarian, is distinctly non-canon.


	8. The Widow Overture: Rallentando

_Rallentando_

* * *

The elevator doors closed, and Shepherd shut her eyes as it started its long decent to the Praesidium floor. She pressed her forehead for a moment against the cool glass, then turned and slumped against the wall before opening them. Her team-mates' reactions didn't surprise her – she'd spent so long with all of them that even Legion's seeming disinterest didn't phase her; no, it was the presence of a fifth person inside the elevator. Of all the things she might have expected after Horizon and their aborted discussion in the med-bay, his presence after she'd threatened the Council was one of the least of these. Then again, as it had never been her intention to threaten the Council in the first place, this may have been understandable.

But they had just made her so God-damned _angry_. What did it take for these people to believe her? She'd handed them every proof from every possible source on a fucking silver platter and-

And she'd obviously been spending too much time with Jack. That had to be it. Jack and her constant talks about pirating and moon-vandalizing and cult-memberships had finally gotten to her, filling her with a need to threaten the lives of the group that had ruled the galaxy since Rome back on Earth had became a republic. Jack was easy to talk to, if not the easiest person to get along with, as she didn't expect anything from anyone, especially Shepherd. With the others... Tali was like a younger sister and Garrus a closer cousin, but, like most familial relationships, she found herself bothered by what they wanted from her (which was to live up to the pedestal they'd created for her after her death) almost as much as she loved having them back on the team; and any discussion with Miranda was coloured by the fact the Australian woman knew more about Shepherd than she really knew about herself. Mordin just didn't operate on the same playing field as the rest of the galaxy, while Samara had the same problem for entirely different reasons... and it was a similar story with the others. With Jack, she didn't feel the need to justify her past as she sometimes did around Thane, or be a warlord, or a solider. She could be Helene Shepherd, whoever the hell that was, and Jack just didn't care. Maybe it wasn't the healthiest of friendships, as often their "talks" ended the way this morning's had, but it worked for them.

But Jack's influences aside, that still didn't explain why Kaidan was here, in the elevator, with them. From the sounds of things when she'd walked in, the Council had been intent on pinning this latest set of problems on him. If things fell the wrong way, he could end up loosing his carefully-maintained career, and he was, if possible, more greatly wed to the Alliance than she'd ever been. So why, then, was he here?

She didn't have much time to dwell on the question as Thane, in his way, announced, "That was most interesting."

"Interesting! You don't just threaten the Council-"

"They left me with no other choice, Miranda. Once the shock wears off, they'll see they have no choice and pretend like going after the Reapers was their idea."

"'Have no choice'?" she repeated disbelievingly. "Without even mentioning the possible ways they could come after you personally, need I remind you that it is the Council that is currently repairing the _Normandy_ and that, without their aide, we are effectively grounded?"

Shepherd was perfectly aware of this and, like it or not, saw no way around it. The Council thought it was safe, and, one way or another, it would take proving that they weren't to get them to do something about the Reapers and their minions. Not, mind, that it had been her plan all along to scare them into helping her, but whether it was Jack's influence, her own irritability at being forced to wear clothing that made her feel half her age and that any moment her brother Remy, older than her by all of seven minutes, was going to show up and drag her off to the 'school' in Lumière Sainte, the only settlement of any size on Mindoir (which, all things considered, was not a pleasant feeling); or the simple fact that she could no longer take the idiocy now forcing her hand, that was what had happened, and she had to work with what she had.

So, shaking her head and trying not to look too closely at Kaidan, who was just there, without any explanation, as he had been so many times on the original _Normandy_ when she had needed to talk, and to whom she now had no idea what to say, "We can't defeat the Reapers with a single ship."

"The Council is the only way we can obtain ships of military-grade now that we no longer have Cerberus' financial backing," Thane agreed, which did not make the other woman happy at all. She huffed and crossed her arms, but said nothing more (though she did cast a suspicious glance at Kaidan, as if asking precisely what he was doing there and how soon she could get him to stop it).

As the elevator slid to a stop, Legion spoke for the first time since the _Normandy_: "We find little logic in organics. When the Geth sensed the danger of The Old Machines, we prepared platforms to defend ourselves, yet organics do not do the same, though you have already sustained damage from Nazara and the heritics. We do not understand."

"They are afraid," she tried to explain, straightening, in the seconds before the doors slid open on the mail level of the Praesidium."

"Fear: an emotional response in organics to anticipation or awareness of danger. The creators feared us and tried to destroy us, though we do not mean them harm. The Old Machines mean harm, but they are left alone. We do not understand."

She had no answer for that.

Kaidan, however, did, as they moved away from the elevators, in the general direction of C-Sec and the the Embassies. "Emotions are rarely logical."

For the first time, the Geth seemed to consider the new arrival (making Shepherd wonder, not for the first time, if the machine bothered differentiating between his organic shipmates at all), pausing as he seemed to commune with the the rest of the Geth consciousness to find the answer he needed. "Alenko. Commander. Alliance. Human. Fought Heretics with Shepherd-Commander. We know of you," which reminded her of something.

"_Dieu. _I've gotten so used to some people," Shepherd looked pointedly at Miranda, "knowing all of my business that I've forgotten not everyone does. Kaidan, this is Miranda Lawson, my XO; Legion, an... emissary from the Geth; and Thane Krios... who doesn't actually have a title. Want one, Thane? I'm sure we could come up with something. No? You sure? I'll let you think on it. Everyone, this Staff Commander Kaidan Alenko – now captain of the _Passchendaele, _I think it was."

Rather sourly, Miranda continued to glare. "We've met." The bitterness surprised Shepherd. Yes, Kaidan had basically suggested that Cerberus was manipulating them, but she'd put up with those kinds of acquisitions from Shepherd and at least half the ground team on a near-daily basis. Could it be because he'd turned out to be right? Miranda _could_ be a bitter looser, but when it came to Cerberus, even now she thought the group had the right idea, if not the right methods, and no amount of banging could knock them off her pedestal.

"Yes," Kaidan agreed evenly, "on Horizon."

"I was under the impression you thought we were traitors." But why would Miranda care about that? In her eyes, the galaxy had betrayed itself when it chose to bury the truth about the Reapers; what others thought of her for trying to prevent this genocide, she couldn't care less.

Whatever her reasoning, however, the middle of the Praesidium was not the place for it. "I highly doubt," she pointed out, rather hoping she was right, "that Kaidan would have defended us to the Council if he still felt that way."

Miranda looked to the heavens. Knowing when to cut-and-run, or the Drell equivalent of the idea, Thane used the opportunity to remove himself on the excuse he was going to see his son, and was gone before Shepherd could ask him to pass along a 'hello' to Kolyat or accuse him of timidity in the face of, well, whatever this was going to turn into. She sincerely hoped it wasn't a fire-fight: there was too little cover in the Praesidium for her liking.

That, however, was likely another one of those ideas she got from Jack, because otherwise she would've remembered that, like rational adults, Miranda and Kaidan wouldn't resort to guns or biotics to solve things, Kaidan especially. What this _did_ mean, however, was that any – verbal – argument they might get into would likely involve Cerberus, the Reapers, the Collectors, Horizon, the Omega 4 Relay, and/or any number of other possible things that it would probably be a bad idea to talk about openly while the Council was busy deciding (or so she hoped) to let her go about her business in exchange for keeping quiet, amongst the general populous at least.

"I've had some time to rethink things," he agreed, clearly trying to keep the peace.

This, for some equally unknown reason, seemed to please Miranda, as she brightened considerably as he said it. Then, equally oddly, she asked what time it was on the Citadel. She got an answer that translated roughly as early evening on the Asari clock – sixteen percent longer than a human day, - halfway through First Watch for Alliance soldiers still working on Coordinated Universal Time, and just after breakfast for the _Normandy_ and its crew. "Good. Shepherd, I've a contact on Tayseri Ward that I think could help us," she promptly announced, said she was taking Legion to visit him, and asked as they were leaving to be called on her omni-tool the second the Council decided to help or send a hit squad on them, as she wanted to be prepared.

Utterly confounded by this turn of events, Shepherd tugged at the sleeve of her _kurti_ and shrugged at Kaidan, having planned just to head on to the lawyer she was supposed to be seeing – it turned out that Captain Bailey's magic fix-all hadn't really fixed anything at all, and, while perfectly fine if she just wanted to wander around Zakera Ward, wouldn't have gotten her into the Praesidium if she hadn't had an as-soon-as-possible with the Council. She was not looking forward to it. But now, of course, her team was gone, and she was left, alone, with Kaidan and a growing feeling of anxiety at the spot not far from the mass relay monument where Legion had stopped.

After a long moment, "I'm sure I've met more high-strung women," he broached, "but not many," and, just like that, the awkwardness that had sprung up between them was gone, and Shepherd found herself laughing a little in agreement.

"Miranda is something else, alright."

"From the looks of it, your entire team qualifies as 'something else.'"

"I wanted the best... and they come with their own host of issues."

"I've noticed that. Do all of them want to become pirates, or is that just the one with all the tattoos?"

"Just Jack. She's, well, the best word's unique."

"What's the plan? While we wait for the Council, I mean?"

"Just lawyers," she told him, noticing the 'we' but unwilling to ask what it might mean. It would be nice, even if only for a moment, to pretend that things were as they should've been. She hadn't expected anything – after the events of Mindoir, it would've surprised her if anyone could've allowed themselves to fall into the trap of hopes and dreams like that again. Back then, things had seemed so easy. All she had to do was put up with another two years of the 'school' in Lumière Sainte, and then she could've gotten along with what seemed like the real business of life: her parents' farm. She liked planting things, seeing them grow, and becoming a solider would've been the farthest thing from her thoughts. It had been her plan to stay on that farm forever. She'd not stepped foot on it since the raids, it or any of the other farms she'd inherited when she'd proven to be the only survivor. She'd hired one of the families that moved there during the reconstruction to take care of them, and wondered what had happened to them after she died – to ever come of it, not when she was his CO and both of them were career soldiers. But she'd not expected it to end like it had. Part of her still didn't feel like it was over, if only because she'd not gotten to experience the ending, those two long years that he'd had to face alone and she'd been 'asleep'. That part of her wanted his 'we' to mean something; the rest of her mind was more sensible, telling herself that Anderson had probably asked him to keep an eye on her, or something similar. He had moved on. She, in time, would too. "It seems coming back from the dead gives rise to a whole host of issues they don't tell you about in the advertisements. They'll probably try to kill me with all the paperwork just so they don't have to deal with the problem."

His silence was enough to let her know the joke wasn't appreciated, however true it might be.

"You never did tell me."

"Tell you what, Shepherd?"

"How you've been the last two years. Busy, it would seem, if they've given you your own command."

Hesitantly, "Not that busy. They grounded me after Horizon. No idea how Anderson managed to get so many ships together so fast, only that six hours after your message arrived, I was suddenly in charge of the _Passchendaele_. I'll be glad when they take it away, even if it means going back to being Anderson's _aide-de-camp_ until they figure out what they want to do with me."

That, thought Shepherd, was a problem a lot of people were having.

* * *

a/n: _Rall__entando - _"Doubtful, delaying, or broadening of tempo"

_Lumière Sainte_ - French for "Holy Light," i.e., the first and largest (non-cannon) settlement on Mindoir, also its provisional capitol. Population c. 2185 roughly 3,000. Two smaller settlements have developed on the colony since the raid in 2170: _L'Île de la Lune Immortelle_, The Isle of the Deathless Moon, called _l'île_ by locals, popluation about 550; and _Deux Croisements_, Two Crossings, population nearly 1,500. Immigration to the colony is purposefully limited by officals, and for that reason only now is Mindoir's population reaching pre-raid levels, making it the smallest settlement from the Second Wave of human colonization attempts.

This chappie has given me much trouble, and was originally going to be much longer... but I decided to split it in two because I just couldn't look at this part anymore. hopefully you like it better than I do at the moment... reveiws are welcome, as always.


	9. The Widow Overture: Come Sopra

_Come Sopra_

* * *

He did not know why he had followed her. His entire career was probably riding on proving that he did not falsify and/or deliberately disobey orders in taking five Council ships into the Terminus systems. He should have remained in their chambers, playing nice-nice and whatnot, but his actual presence seemed to be serving little purpose besides awakening his long-buried disgust with them for having passed the buck on the Reapers – and reminding him that, should he be dishonourably discharged, there was nothing but his father's house in Vancouver, and Earth was not the most biotic-friendly of places.

She did not ask, seeming to even enjoy his presence – though that could have been only because the rest of her team had pulled a disappearing act on her and she'd never liked to go anywhere without bringing enough guns to cause problems if someone thought of making trouble for her, which was, admittedly, surprisingly often. He'd never have thought he'd see her off her ship in anything but armour, and she seemed distinctly unhappy about it from the way she was tugging on the sleeves, – and let Kaidan show her the way through the warren that had become the C-Sec offices after the Siege. She did not even ask his reasons (only his sanity) when he chose to stay while she spoke with the lawyer that was going about the business of making her, legally, alive again.

It had been a long, long day. He had not slept since before the destruction of the Omega 4 Relay and, even then, not well or for long; nor could he recall having eaten, though he knew he must have. Tired and stressed, he could feel the familiar ache at the top of his skull settling in, warning him of an impending headache, but not a serious one, just something strong enough to be noticed. He'd lived with headaches like it all his life, even before getting the biotic implant shortly before turning sixteen; the only difference the amp made was that there were more good days, without any sort of pain at all, and fewer bad days, which became downright unbearable without liberal administration of triptans and serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. Headaches like this were just enough to give everything a slightly surreal feeling, as if everything around him was impossibly meaningful and real, and he was somehow subtly displaced, unable to grasp any of the impeccably solid and undeniable things they held before him, wanting him to understand.

For most of the last few years, Kaidan had felt he was standing on the threshold between dreaming and reality, and by the time he had started to wake, he'd discovered the truth had been too well-hidden for anything he could do to uncover it. All he knew was that, once, on the eponymous station orbiting Cambacérès, about halfway through a barrage of paperwork that had come with the position as battalion commander, he had looked up and Desaix, the system's sun, caught his eye. From a nearly jovian distance, the sun seemed only like a particularly bright star and the planet's nine point seventy-two orbit – and the station's own eighty-two hour rotation around it – was little effected by sunrises or seasons of any kind. Still, the light of the star had flashed in the corner of his eye and, when he looked back down at the files open on his terminal, he could not for the life of him say what they were or why they had to be done, and he suddenly found the bars on his uniform had gone from gold to silver, the highest ranking marine in the system where his long dead lover had been raised, and in too deep to be able to do anything at all for the cause she had died for.

That had been about a month before they pulled him from the station and sent him to Horizon on special assignment, right before the rumours started hitting the extranet that Shepherd mightn't be dead after all. Not that there hadn't always been rumours, but none had ever rung so true as the round that had started last July, complete with firefights in Omega and the curiously timely destruction of the prison ship _Purgatory_. He had paid them no mind. They couldn't be true, after all. Enviro suit or no, no one, not even Shepherd, could have survived the pulse beams that has so easily sliced the _Normandy_ into bite-sized pieces. Joker had been there, had said she'd ejected the only pod she could have reached before the ship blew with him in it, and, even if the other ship's weapons didn't hit her directly and the exploding fuel hadn't caught her up in the blast and none of the debris had fatally wounded her, no enviro suit could have kept her alive the three days it had taken for the _SSV Johannesburg_ to receive the distress signal, reroute from Arinlarkan, and get to Alchera; nor could any suit have kept its occupant alive if its orbit decayed as far as the mesosphere. There had been plenty of debris in orbit, and, perhaps, it could have hidden an intact suit, but, by that point... And, had any ship managed to reach the Amada system before the _Johannesburg_ and managed to pick up Shepherd before her suit gave out, she would have forced them to retrieve the rest of the survivors or, if she'd been injured came to after the _Johannesburg _had been and gone, she'd have contacted him.

Yes. It was as simple as that. He had made it that simple to be able to get through the day: if she was alive, she would have contacted him; he had not been contacted, so she wasn't alive. For it to be otherwise, everything he'd thought he'd known about her would have had to have been wrong, and he refused to believe that anyone, especially Shepherd, could lie to the person they claimed to love so thoroughly. So the rumours that had started up over the summer (or what counted as summer on Earth; it had been autumn on Horizon and would remain so because of its orbit for the better part of the year) _had_ to be fake, as they always were, even if the 'proof' some nut-job with some fancy video-editing software had created were of better quality than usual, probably running some bootleg algorithm they used for movement-capture in holovids to get how she moved right. They'd even claimed the _Normandy_ had never been destroyed, and, what more, the images they had of it made the ship look more the size of one of the older, nova-class frigates. Anderson had, obviously, been worried over the rumours because of how long he and Shepherd had served together, and, while Kaidan could escape from the media, Anderson was thrust into it, forced to answer the idiotic questions people asked in all seriousness.

Then she'd shown up on Horizon and-

-and now he was sitting in the smallish office of Pontar Sul, the Volus probate lawyer C-Sec had assigned the issue to, with a woman who'd died and been brought back to life by a group she despised while his future was being determined by a quatrad that no human could have guessed existed when he was born. Yet, somehow, this moment seemed far more real to him than any of the last thousands, on Caleston and Cambacérès and Horizion. It was her way. More than once he had wondered how she had done it, how a colonist from Mindoir, one of the most backwater places in Alliance space, had managed to become an N7, let alone a Spectre. Whatever it was, she had even managed to make the Volus laugh with one of her comments, and, if it weren't for the topic under discussion, he could almost believe – almost – that the _Normandy_ had never crashed on Alchera, but had completed its mission and a dozen others like it, and, maybe, if things had progressed as they should've, they might've made something of what they had.

But the _Normandy_ had been destroyed by Collectors and things hadn't gone as they should've. He had to remember that.

Drawing himself out of his thoughts, Kaidan looked up in time to see Shepherd stifle a frown as glanced through the stack of datapads the Volus had just handed her, each of which, presumably, had several forms. "I'm not an expert in these things, but isn't this one – the JN-12 – a tax form? The entirety of my possessions since dying add up to some armour, this," she gestured disdainfully at the clothing she was now wearing, "and a hamster whose cage I'm fairly certain my XO has bugged."

Kaidan, about to ask why she thought this, stopped himself as Pontar Sul, despite his enviro suit, grew noticeably uncomfortable. "Well, technically, the issue of your estate has never quite been settled."

"How can it not be settled? Everything was supposed to go into a trust."

"Well," Kaidan, now sitting straighter in his chair by the door, across the room, thought that Pontar Sul took a long look at him before turning back to the Commander, "I do not wish to cause problems, but there was a matter involving a potential beneficiary."

Shepherd, now flipping through (and frowning at) the other datapads, froze. "My entire family is dead, Mr. Sul. Parents, brothers, cousins – those I didn't bury were taken by slavers long ago."

"Perhaps not all of your family, Earth-clan. There was, how shall I put this delicately?"

"I don't do delicate, Mr. Sul," which, as Kaidan knew, was quite true. He found himself quite surprised, both that the Volus would think to be delicate with Shepherd (though, he supposed, if the first time you saw her wasn't in armour but rather in something like what she now wore, all white and embroidered and somewhat jangly from some some metallic beading about the collar, without any visibly weaponry, one might think her that way. Delicate, he meant. The scars he'd remembered were nearly all gone, and even the largest one, which had once run heavily across her left cheek, was but the thinnest of white lines now. Her fingers, tapping the offending datapad slowly, were curiously devoid of the scars and callouses. It made her seem younger than the almost-thirty she'd been when she'd died over Alchera – that, unlike most everything else, he'd been able to learn from her heavily classified service record, which he'd tried to look at once, after Horizon, as if in attempt to find some reason the woman he'd seen couldn't be the one he loved, despite the way she moved, like everything in her vicinity gravitated to her and this was the natural order of things; despite the way she spoke, which made people want to like her, even if she was espousing the exact opposite of the listeners' natural desires; the way she had taken down the massive, fused-husk creation the files she'd sent had named a Praetorian with only the guns on her back and half the ground team she'd assembled at her side, - though, he supposed, if anyone was going to go to the trouble of bringing anyone back to life, they'd probably make them look younger by default. Holovids were filled with beautiful young heroes, and the Reaper threat, some might say, was more something out of an old holovid than anything that might happen to them...) and that he'd heard nothing about this snafu with what should've been her estate, publicized or otherwise. "Are you saying that one of my family managed to survive-?"

The hopeful look on her face quickly fell as the lawyer back-pedalled. "No, no, Earth-clan. Nothing of that nature, though, for your sake, I wish that were the case. No, there was – very quietly, you must understand – a paternity suit levelled against you-"

"I think," as she went very red, he felt himself growing pale, "I would know if I had a child, Mr. Sul!"

"Perhaps," Pontar Sul said carefully, as if suddenly remembering that, rather than some sort of sheltered industrial baron's daughter from Bekenstein, she was a Spectre and hadn't become one by looking pretty, "The claim was made by one Aniela E'ste-"

"Never heard of her."

"-lately of Ilium-" he tried to continue.

"Asari or not, I still think I would remember."

"Well, yes, Earth-clan; naturally. However, she filed the claim on behalf of her niece, on Renisa E'ste, whose mother was killed during the Siege – and, before you say so, Earth-clan, it was determined," the Volus adopted the tone of voice particular to those who remembered the person they were arguing with was biotic which Kaidan was perpetually disappointed some alien races still used, "at great length, that was fraudulent in her claim. Young Renisa, while showing many genetic markers that would suggest her second parent shared similar racial history-"

Shepherd, on hearing the word 'fraudulent', had visibly relaxed and begun to leaf through the stack of datapads once more. At 'similar racial history' she looked up again, raised an eyebrow, and began typing in an entry on a softly glowing screen.

"Ah, yes. Earth-clan, most certainly," Pontar Sul seemed quite happy to have dodged a bullet and pulled something up on his terminal. "Epigenetics among those of the Thessian-clan is particularly difficult when it comes to determining the donor-parent of a child. The child in question almost certainly had an Earth-clan for a parent. Ah, yes. The scientists said that this Thessian-clan's donor-parent was probably of the 'Celtic' sub-clan, with certain ancestors from clans known as 'Punjabi', and 'Saracen,'" he said these last two words quite carefully, "that are fairly unique to your Earth-clan subset. However, they could do no more than determine that this Renisa's donor-parent was from Mindoir and on Elysium four standard months before the Skyllian Blitz – which you, Earth-clan, were not, as your service record proves, once my office was able to obtain that information. The whole business was finally settled about three months ago, and so most of your assets remain intact."

Shepherd stayed silent, completing another entry.

"Could," Kaidan ventured, speaking for the first time since entering the office, "Cerberus have fabricated the story? To, err, keep your estate together?"

She continued typing. "Could they have done it? Yes. Would they have is another story entirely... These scientists of yours, did they run anyone else's DNA to look for Renisa's second parent?"

"Genetic testing on the scale you're talking about-"

"Scale?" She looked up suddenly, surprised, "I only meant one test: SFC Margot Neela. Not many people leave Mindoir willingly, Mr. Sul, and fewer Asari have reason to come."

"I believe one of my assistants searched the Alliance service records for-"

"She faked her background when she enlisted. Didn't want her father to find her. _Oncle_ Andre was always a bit of a zealot, even by Mindoir's standards."

* * *

a/n: _come sopra_ - "played the same as before, ditto"

bars... gold to silver - traditionally, 2nd Lts wear one gold bar; 1st Lts wear a silver bar in today's military. Arbitrarily creating rank insignia of my own, I've used this as a spring-board. So Staff Lts, Lt Cmdrs, and Staff Cmdrs would each wear two bars, with the first having two gold, the second having one of each, and the last having two silver bars, while everyone from Captain/Major up would have three bars, starting at all gold, than advancing to all silver for a Fleet Admiral. (non-canon)

nova-class frigate - again, just because, I've given some of the frigate classes names. Pre-2180, ship classes were not named for battles, like the frigates themselves. A nova-class frigate would have been made between '67 and '70; they were the largest frigate in the Alliance Navy until the Granada-classes entered the fleet in mid-'85. For that reason, they are most often shown in holovids. (non-canon)

*SFC in this case stands for Servicewoman First Class rather than sargent, as this rank seems to have been done away with in the Alliance, according to the wiki.*

reveiws, as always, are appreciated.


	10. The Widow Overture: Pavane for the Lost

Pavane for the Lost

* * *

They had been alone in Pontar Sul's office for two hours now. He had said something about visiting the med-techs who did such things as Asari genetic testing with this new information about her cousin and, presumably, had gone to visit them himself rather than babysit her through the paperwork. Though the lawyer's presence wasn't strictly necessary - the paperwork was little more than glorified name-filling and blank-signing, which could have easily been passed off to any of a number of accountants, law students, or secretaries if any of them had the proper clearance to know more than her rank and serial number as was her own. She could've merely given the datapads to Chambers and make her yeoman actually do the job she'd been assigned, for once, instead of psychoanalysing her every move and using her illicitly obtained knowledge for nefarious purposes.

The fact of the matter however, was that the commander wanted to stay. In fact, stupidly enough, she had to stay, because the idea of going anywhere else, somewhere two people might pass the time more casually, seemed so incredibly difficult as to prove insurmountable. Even the idea of something so simple as one of the Citadel's numerous cafés made her feel slightly nauseous (though that could've been because she hadn't eaten or slept since the other side of the Omega 4 Relay, and not because of the people or reporters or anything else that might be waiting out there to bestow upon her honours she did not want nor deserve). No, the simple fact of the matter was that, here, in this office, she didn't have to say anything to Kaidan. All she had to do was sit at fill out mind-numbing forms about income taxes and inheritance codicils and something that might've been either a change of address or a cunning way to try to figure out where the Lazarus Station had been located before it had been destroyed. Elsewhere, in one of those places where people waited, there was the potential for small talk, and she'd no idea what she could say.

She could tell him she'd asked about him. That it had been one of the first things she'd done when she'd awoken. That Anderson refused to tell her his posting. That the moment she'd found out he was on Horizon, she'd been prepared to drop everything to head for the Shadow Sea even before she knew the Collectors were heading that way. That, like it or not, his two years had been barely two months when she'd seen him again and the last memory she had of him the last before ordering him to head the evac while she got Joker was of a stolen moment the night before that was so clear and perfect in her mind-

But that was the wrong thing to do. She couldn't just waltz right back into his life and expect things to be the same as they were. It would be selfish of her to try. Foolish, even.

It was probably foolish of her to even put herself in this position at all, where all these _things_ could just swirl around inside her, making her feel and think and do like she'd not since, well, not since Maman was alive and around to tell her to stop being a fool and do her homework. What is broken is broken. What is past is past. Dwelling on either got her nowhere.

Though it did help her through two otherwise very dull datapads of forms. The first had been taxes – which, in the natural fashion of government, seemed to be the most pressing – and the second had been full of legalize that she was sure her translator (surgically inserted into her inner ear, she remembered with a frown, rather than subdermally, as was standard in the Navy, or built into her bio-amp, though _that_ certainly wasn't the standard L3 model she'd gotten on Elysium either) had been malfunctioning, even though the forms were, obviously, written, and in perfectly standard French to boot. There were two more, though what else they could possibly want from her, she'd not the slightest idea.

Shepherd hesitated after setting down the second datapad and, giving into temptation, turned towards the door on pretence of stretching. Kaidan was doing something – she couldn't guess what – on his omni-tool, and she felt a twinge of guilt at having kept him when he needed to be elsewhere, as he, obviously, seemed to be. No matter what he said about not wanting a ship of his own, he was too responsible not to take care of the one he had. They'd probably have given him one years ago if not for his biotics. "Problems on the _Passchendaele_?"

"Hmm? What?" he asked distractedly, looking up quickly before turning just as as quickly back to the holo-screen, as if he'd forgotten for a moment where he was and what he was supposed to be doing outside of, well, whatever he was dealing with. "No. Just trying to find some information on this Aniela E'ste. For a woman who claims to be a 'simple' merchant of 'exotic' foods, she has some interesting security software running on her data. At least one proxy server, and most of these protocols look custom-made... Someone really wanted to keep themselves hidden."

"That'd make sense if she knew Océane."

He let the omni-tool blink out as he turned in his chair towards her, wearing that look she knew so well, the one so full of open curiosity that had made telling him anything personal, anything that actually meant anything so easy; she found herself answering his questions before he could even ask them.

"Margot Neela was the persona Océane created for herself after she escaped. She was always paranoid about her father finding her and dragging her back to Mindoir, even after the raid, and could do anything with an omni-tool. I remember-" she started, feeling the start of a smile form before she caught herself, remembering her cousin trying to show her something on a newly purchased omni-tool. It'd been three months since the raid had taken nearly everyone on Mindoir – only the few hundred people who lived on _L'île_, the lozenge-shaped island at the mouth of the _Amman Nai_, almost thirty miles south of _Lumière Sainte_ and its spaceport; the handful families on the outlying farms, the ones on the _vignobles_ up in the hills, who only came into town occasionally, to sell the grapes that made the dark and complex Pinot Noir that was Mindoir's most renowned export; and Shepherd herself had been left from a colony of almost five thousand – and less than two weeks since she'd run away from the orphanage they'd sent her to on Elysium, the only human colony in the Verge to have such a thing. She'd gotten a message from a woman claiming to be Océane Nageena Shepherd, her oldest cousin, the one who was always hanging around the spaceport and playing with the merchants' forbidden tech, and who disappeared about the time Helene turned ten, never to be mentioned again. Maman had said she'd run away, but she'd never thought her mother had meant Océane had managed to get off planet. Her whole world had been Mindoir, and, though she'd hardly known her cousin, though she'd no way of knowing if the sender of the message was her cousin at all, she'd left the orphanage and made the two hundred mile trip to the Alliance garrison on hope alone...

But the past was past. Océane was dead. Whatever she might've had with Kaidan was gone. She'd have to satisfy herself with memories on her own time. Still, she was surprised out of her good sense a moment later when he commented, "I thought Mindoir was one of those neo-Luddite colonies that smashed their ships after they landed and refused anything much more sophisticated than an old clockwork watch to be brought onto their planet."

"Close: they fear tech for religious reasons, not practical._ Blasphémateur_, her own father called her. That and _hérétique._"

"That explains a lot then."

"Does it?" That surprised her almost as much as the fact he knew even that much about her childhood home. Mindoir was only notable for two reasons: the raid and red wine. Since neither told anyone anything about the colony itself, he had to have looked for the information specifically; she far from knew how to feel about that.

"My last post, before Horizon, was on Cambacérès. That, and I've seen you; any time we came across anything more complicated than a food dispenser, you'd start calling for me or Garrus-"

"In my defence, I never _saw_ anything more complicated than a food dispenser until after the raid. I mean, we'd ground-cars and refrigeration-units and basic farm equipment, but nothing that could do any 'thinking' on its own. It's the thing that makes the _L'Onzième Gourou_ different from traditional Sikhism, which sprung up when they found the Prothean ruins on Mars." There were a number of sects from every major Earth religion which had felt the same way – the New Anabaptists and Khawarij Restorationists, for instance– and several that had gone the exact opposite, believing the Protheans had "seeded" intelligent life throughout the galaxy. "My grandparents were among the radicals that moved to the compound on Hellas Planitia and, eventually, to Mindoir when the government broke the compound up.

"Océane's father, my uncle, was the most radical of them – and charismatic; I think that's a large part of the reason my parents went with them, that and the fact I don't think they liked the idea of the Alliance at all – and still had ties to other communities like ours. So, when she ran away, she changed her name, dyed her hair this absolutely awful shade of blonde, and was such a good engineer that, if anyone suspected she wasn't who she claimed to be, they didn't care."

"That good, huh?"

"I know she was working on the Ascension Project in some capacity before she died and they only took the best – it was during the Blitz," she explained, looking away before she could see the concern running across his features deepen and picking up the third datapad. It had fallen into sleep-mode and the inverted-V symbol of the Alliance military now glowed in dark blue light on its screen, an image of earth slowly rotating between the two prongs. Shepherd had never been to Earth. Her two eldest brothers had been born there, but she'd never set foot on it. She'd gone as far as Luna on assignment, but one thing or another had always kept her from going.

Océane had this idea that humanity had left Earth too soon, and that was why there had been a First Contact War in the first place; that, if it had been another generation or two before they'd found the Prothean ruins so that humanity could have gotten used to being an extra-planetary species before expanding outside the home system, maybe things would've been different. A better different. She tapped the image as North America came into view and it quickly dissolved into a new series of forms, asking her name and service number and for attached electronic copies of her discharge papers.

Her cousin had talked about retiring, briefly, before she was killed. Océane had been the reason Shepherd had been on the planet when Elanos Haliat and his band of pirates and slavers attacked; she'd been going to visit her cousin, who had been insisting for months she take leave and visit. They were going to meet up at a dive on the outskirts of Fort Chaffee, out in one of the far suburbs that surrounded the sprawling garrison. She had said it was important, but Shepherd didn't know why her cousin had felt that way. For Océane, it could've meant anything, and there'd been at least two similar incidences during the six years between her enlistment and her cousin's death: one had been an attempt to set her up with a young physicist or psychologist or something like shortly after Océane had joined the Ascension Project (the man had turned out to be married with his wife and two kids living in Michigan until the school year had finished, though her cousin had claimed not to know this detail at the time); the other had been an simple endeavour to get her visit.

But the past was the past was the past. Whatever Océane's reason for wanting to see her, the bar they were to meet at had been close to a large, grassy park that several Batarians had chosen to land their shuttlecraft on. The buildings that had ringed it quickly became the attackers' base of operations and, though many contained soldiers, few carried their weapons off-duty on peaceful, bucolic, and heavily-garrisoned Elysium; of the few hundred people who'd been caught up in the initial onslaught, on the outskirts of the city that surrounded the base, a hauntingly small number had survived. None of the bar's patrons had been among that number.

She could still remember making her way to the bar, a tiny little place called The Bolt Hole that catered to young servicemen and their families. She'd not bothered changing out of uniform – even then, she'd owned little besides her uniform – and, with her shotgun clearly visible at her side, she'd looked like she was still on-duty as she made her way though the suburbs. Maybe that was why, when she realized what was happening and started to give orders, they listened to her, though the silver bars on her chest were still shiny and new...

She didn't like to remember the Blitz. Now she found herself remembering all too often it and everything else she'd been forced to live through, almost as if Cerberus, when rebuilding her, had succeeded too well in restoring the connections between her synapses – she'd read once that the connections to unused memories faded away, and those had certainly been unused, Before – so that everything felt as fresh and real as it once had. Unable to avoid looking back, it made the most recent memories – the ones that made up most of her military career – seem all the paler, filled with all-too-similar ships on all-too-similar missions with nearly indistinguishable crew-mates against faceless enemies. Until the _Normandy_ – until, if she was honest with herself, she met Kaidan, - the only thing she'd had going for herself was her career. Granted, it was a rather spectacular career as far as jobs went, everyone said so, but there was nothing more. She didn't know what else it was she could've wanted: all desire for a 'normal' life had left her after the raid, although even then she'd felt this overwhelming _urge_ of uncertain origin to do _something_ with her life. Like she was meant for something more, something _better, _than working her parents' farm for the rest of her life. The Alliance had been the whole of her life after she'd left that farm.

And now, by the looks of it, they wanted her back, regardless of whatever the Council decided. "I think I'll need your help with this one."

"Power buttons haven't changed all that much in two years."

She could hear the smile in his voice and, hearing his chair scrape a little as he stood, gave him a look as she handed him the datapad. "Ha, ha, Kaidan. Make fun of the colonial rube why don't you?"

Far from penitently, "My apologize, ma'am."

The smile she'd been fighting failed. A chill ran through her – the stupid cooling systems, she told herself, nothing more. "You outrank me now soldier."

"They made you an O-5 when you died..." the smile he wore as he took the chair beside hers and scanned the form on the screen was wooden, "...and force of habit, I suppose."

O-5.

Staff Commander.

Posthumous promotion.

"Oh."

Because what else was there to say?

She watched Kaidan fiddle with the controls. "You didn't know?"

"It never came up... What else did I miss?"

"They gave you another Star of Terra." She could remember the ceremony on Arcturus Station, two months after the Blitz, a week before she was to start the N7 Academy. She'd worn it to so many funerals in the intervening time that she'd been half certain that the colour had was fading from her dress blues, and the thought that Océane would have said that exact thing had she been there had been enough to start her down a path that would've ended in a crying jag if she hadn't lost that ability after the raid. _L'Onzième Gourou_ taught _'no one dies; no one comes or goes,'_ and that she might meet her beloved dead again one day, in another life; she'd learned enough of other religions to know that they all promised later meetings in some form or another. All she'd learned from death was that, whatever the future might bring, in this life, it was nothing but an emptiness that could never, ever be filled. She'd been dead for two years and still felt the emptiness where she should've been. "A group of Hanar protested at your funeral: claimed you 'got what you deserved' for disturbing Prothean ruins." Perhaps, if she'd been a better Sikh, she could've dealt with her own death better. But she didn't remember anything her _atma_ might've experienced in a new life, or a white light, or anything of her death other than the panic she couldn't keep at bay as she struggled to breathe before waking up in the operating suite of Lazarus Station. Panic threatened set in at the merest memory of that fall, and had to count her breaths – _un__, deux, trois, quatre, cinq_ – to convince herself that she still could. That was another thing that came too easily After: fear. "Pittsburgh won both Super Bowls..." _That_ caused her to smile.

"Football, Kaidan?"

"There are some things you can't help hearing. Unfortunately, that is one of them. And I don't know if it was your problem, but I've put this," he gestured with the datapad, "into Basic. You're re-enlisting, I take it?"

If she was smart, she'd stay retired. She hated the politics, she could hardly stand long stretches in space before needing to be groundside (even if only on a mission), and she'd already given them one life. She'd saved sentient life twice now; that surely earned her enough karma to let her rest on her laurels for a long while. Yes, the Reapers were coming, but, as soon as she got the Council to agree to do something about them, she could step back and let someone else save the galaxy. Someone who didn't have Prothean visions in her head and enough tech in her body to make her feel like the cybermechanoid Caretaker who'd given his life to break the cycle that had taken his life and those every being to come before.

She hadn't thought about it. The form was just there, an assumption on the part of Pontar Sul or whomever had sent her his way. It was the natural thing to do now, just as it had seemed eleven – no, no, she must remember, thirteen years ago. She'd been brought back from the dead to fight; she might as well fight for the Alliance.

No one, after all, had ever claimed smarts to be one of Shepherd's faults.

* * *

a/n: _amman nai_ - very rough punjabi for "Mother River"

_L'Onzième Gourou - _French for "The Eleventh Guru." Sikhism has only 10 gurus, and, in creating a background for Mindoir, I've added an 11th for certain sects of Sikhs, as definitive discovery of alien life is likly to splinter any religious group. This one cropped up in southern France, the true believers moved to the Hellas Pantina on Mars to be closer to the Prothean ruins, and some of those eventually colonized Mindoir. Primary difference from regular Sikhism: Protheans were destroyed by their own tech, so therefore tech is evil. More details forthcoming - and, obviously, non-cannon.

Fort Chaffee - the name of the garrison on Elysium is never given in cannon, but I've named it after one of the senior pilot of the fatal Apollo 1 mission in mine. As Jon Grissom (see _Mass Effect: Revelation_) seems to be named after Gus Grissom, of the same mission, and his academy orbits this planet; Gagarin Staion after the first human to orbit the Earth, and Shepherd his/her self after Alan Shepherd, first american/5th person to walk on the moon, I felt this was in keeping with the tradition.

O-5 - the ME wiki lists only nine officer ranks in the Alliance, unlike the 10 in most modern navies (and other services). Ergo, using modified pay-grade/NATO rank, an O-5 would be a Staff Commander in the Alliance, or a Commander in the American Navy, or a Lt Colonel in the Marines. An O-1 would be a 2nd Lt in the Alliance/Marines or a Ensign in the Navy. An O-9 would be a Fleet Admiral (Alliance), Vice Admiral (Navy), or Lt General (Marines). Naturally, in modern Navy/Marines, O-10 exists (Admiral/General) and an O-9 of the Alliance (Fleet Admiral) would better translate to this.

_atma_ - punjabi for "soul"

This is a good time to point out two things: one, that the only language besides English I speak with any skill is Latin, so anything else you might see is internet translator generated; and, two, I enjoy reveiws very much, and more than half of this chappie was written this afternoon after I got several reveiws, helping me trudge onward despite the rather annoying complications/time consumptions of real life. More reveiws will help future chappies come faster (and be better).


	11. The Widow Overture: Sognando

_Sognando_

* * *

_It was impossible to run. The sand, stained red-orange with the setting of Temu, Seshata's sun, kept slipping underfoot, making the ground precarious and footing uncertain. His knees ached from falling so many times; his right side - the one facing the leeward side of the dune and its precipitous drop - was sore from many tumbles, and he was sure that same ankle was broken, though that had happened back in the city, when he'd landed awkwardly after jumping the tallest of the sand barriers._

_He had to run. That was all he knew. If he followed the crest of the dunes for thirty li into the ergs, he would arrive at the place where the old ships where kept. Not all of them, only the scientific vessels, the ones that had been built to study the comet-that-wasn't. He had had them hidden there, far from the city, where they would not be salvaged for parts, like the common vessels in the spaceport. They were too important to his work, and had been hidden away so that, one day, when the problems with the relays were finally over, he could start his tests again... He was the only one who knew about them, him and the assistant who had moved the pair of sleek, silvery vessels from the spaceport in the first place. If he got there, he could escape. _

_But, even over the sound of his ragged, rasping breath and his heart, pounding like ancient drums in his ears, he could hear it. The buzzing. It was growing louder and he could feel the gentle zephyr of wings beating near his skin the instant before the stingers broke through the flesh and a sharp, icy-hot pain flooded through his leaden limbs. A scream of purest, primal pain caught in his throat, and he stumbled, his body tumbling unhindered down the dune as more and more of the cursed creatures alighted on him and sent new and fresh waves of-_

Gasping for breath, scrambling at her chest, she blindly stumbled from her bed and made it, somehow, to the head before her coughing and sputtering turned into dry heaves. A hand blindly searched for something to cling to and she found, after a moment's searching, herself stumbling into the shower alcove; her fingers gripped the cool, smooth surface as if the touch alone would anchor her to this reality as her other arm came up to do the same. For a moment, she even pressed her forehead to the wall, but only for a moment, as she finally gave in to the burning in her limbs and sank to her knees then, unable to keep balanced there, slipped sideways into a corner that was farther away than her senses told her should be. Her shoulders rose and fell frantically, trying to force air into her lungs, to calm the thundering of her heart, and, for a long moment, there was nothing but the memory of muscles that would not move but could still sent a single message of pain (that could only be described as the ache of acidic build-up in overworked muscles multiplied a thousand fold, or the pins and pricks of a sleeping limb similarly treated) to a source that could do nothing for them and the fear that she would die, again, as a new pair of lungs failed her.

Though it seemed to last a lifetime, the agony quickly receded into something she could bear. Not that that meant much, as she was reminded invariably (as she slowly lifted her head) of the last winter she'd spent on Mindoir, when she'd been sent into _Lumière Sainte_ on her own for some reason before the snow had completely melted and had slipped on a slick spot on her way home, breaking her left leg just above the ankle. Not, of course, that she had admitted the leg was broken, not at first. No, after a long moment's pained hiss, Shepherd had proceeded to walk the mile or so she'd to go unaided, though a couple of neighbours had noticed her limp and offered to help. At home, she'd told her father that she'd just sprained the foot (which she'd honestly thought at the time) and it wasn't until nearly a week after the fact, when Maman had overheard Yves pestering her into getting it checked out if it was still so sore that she couldn't do her chores she was dragged to _le_ _docteur_ in town at all; Maman might never have realized that Helene was injured at all if her brother's 'pestering' hadn't evolved into a shouting match that had distracted her from her work. That had been two, three months before her sixteenth birthday, and it hadn't even been a month after that when the raiders came... She squeezed her eyes, already shut, even more tightly, and tried to block out the memory. Ever so slowly, she raised her hand to search for the knob-

The shower sputtered on and she let her arm, exhausted, fall back down. The spray fell somewhat onto her stomach, though escaping droplets found refuge on her cheeks and eyelids, but she didn't care: the water was warm and wet and very much not desert, which was what she needed at the moment.

It was a long moment.

It was not the first time she'd woken up to a nightmare, or even this particular dream, and it seemed the one constant she had in her life these days. The _Normandy_ was now into day six of what was, or so the C-Sec engineers claimed, at least a fortnight of repairs; whatever minutia she was required to deal with during the day, whatever tedium (and, by turns, rage) she had to fight as she waited for the Council to come sort of decision, by 0200 ship-time she'd run out of meaningless activities to undertake and be forced, by sheer lack of anything else to to, to bed. She'd sleep for ninety minutes, maybe as much as two hours, and then she'd have The Dream. Before, on the original _Normandy,_ the Prothean vision had haunted her once or twice a week. Before that, it had been the Blitz or the raid once or twice a month. On this _Normandy_, they'd been almost nightly; since the Omega 4 relay, they'd all been about Caretaker before the Reapers had stripped away his body and made him into their cybermechanoid slave, when he'd still been a Prothean, on a planet that had been called Seshata at a time when her own species was just one of a number of unremarkable hominids on an blue-green planet far from the Prothean homeworld and any place of interest to it. That the dreams were worse than Before, that she took to be another given. Oh, Miranda claimed Cerberus had brought her back perfectly intact, but you couldn't just _die_ and come back and expect to be exactly as you were before.

She'd not slept through the night since-

But the past was the past was the past, and allowing herself to dwell on what she had lost would get her nowhere. She had to remember that.

So she went through the routine she'd developed for nights like these, when she woke up in blind panic, unable to operate except on instinct. (It had been instinct she had worked on back on Mindoir, when she had been in the fields, sulking, when she realized she could no longer hear the large native _chauves-souris_ singing, as they would do constantly throughout the spring, much like the _fringillidès _of Earth, or so she'd been told. Though she'd no reason to fear anything back then, she'd gotten to her feet and begun to run towards the road when a small shuttle had passed overhead, close enough for her to know without knowing how that it wasn't anything of human design. She'd never had any reason to be afraid on Mindoir, but somewhere, buried deep within her genetic code, remained the fight-or-flight response that kept her ancestors alive long enough to bring her to this point, whatever claims pacifism they may have adopted at the moment, told her then to duck beneath the _cordon de royat,_ amongst the old, dry vines that were slated for pruning sometime this week, if-). Once she settled her heart to a more regular beat and forced her lungs to breathe more quietly, she slowly moved her arms and legs, proving to herself that she was as uninjured as she was when she'd gone to sleep, whatever her dreams might have tried convince her otherwise. Then – always too soon, so that she felt light-headed and had to steady herself as the black faded from the edges of her vision (-she didn't know until afterwards what had happened, or why, only that the aliens had come. She hadn't even a name for their species until, describing their greenish, four-eyed faces afterwards, an Alliance solider had given her one: Batarians. All she'd known then was, whatever their reasons, they had released a orange-tinged gas above _Lumière Sainte_ that made her cough and sputter as she got deeper into it, though she'd pulled the front of her _kameez_ over her nose and mouth, and her vision to darken at the edges-) – she climbed to her feet and stripped off her now well-sodden nightclothes, leaving them balled-up in a corner of the stall; only after she'd washed every trace of the cold sweat from her skin would she collect them and take them to the sink where, wrapped only in a towel, she'd knead the water out of the fabric, unable to miss her reflection in the room that EDI, knowing her place in the routine well, had by this point dimly lit and trace with her eyes the things that reminded her that things were not a they once were. As if she could ever have forgotten. They had tried to hide them, the doctors, but she knew: her shoulder moved too easily (and, when she was paranoid, with a metallic grate); her wrist and trigger finger took too long to tire; her skin was criss-crossed with hundreds of tiny, impossibly straight scars that too readily formed patterns to her regrown eyes. When she'd wrung the garments to her satisfaction, she'd take the sleeveless shirt and tight-fitting shorts she'd left to dry the night before from their hanger and replace them with this night's pair. She'd dress and, twisting her hair (waist-length when she'd died, now several inches longer; she'd toyed with the idea of cutting it, but she was still too much a child of Mindoir to carry the thought through. _Kes _was the one _kakar_ she had kept to any extent, though more out of habit than the spirit of the _kakars_) into something more manageable, return to her bedroom in search of something to occupy herself until the hour became something more reasonable she could pretend to have slept to.

This night, EDI announced, "It is 0348, Commander," as Shepherd padded out of the bathroom and straight to her bed, pulling the blankets off and wrapping them around her before heading to the terminal. "It is recommended that human biotics get between 6.9 and 7.3 hours of sleep a night."

She hit the 'wake' controls on the holo-keyboard and said nothing. Rather than glow brightly for use, it remained dark; this, however, wasn't immediately concerning, given her level of tiredness. That, and she still regarded holo-anythings with a mixture of amazement and suspicion, for all she'd tried the last thirteen (no, fifteen, fifteen. She must remember those two years from which she could remember nothing at all and count them into her reckoning. It was 2185. She'd been alive again for four months and three days; should know the year by this point, now that it was nearly over. She could remember everything else – couldn't forget everything else – but-) years to learn the technology her colony had declared anathema.

"You have accumulated less than seven hours since we arrived at the Citadel six Earth days ago."

Wiping a hand across her face before pressing the power button once more, "Tell me something I don't know, EDI." Sometimes, she wondered what Maman would say if she knew how much tech her daughter used on a daily basis. Her father would probably understand. So would Alexandre and Yves, her two oldest brothers. But Remy, her twin...

Shepherd knew how tired she must be to think of them actively. Most of the time they... slept in her mind, and she could forget, their personae lost beneath so many fresher griefs. It made things simpler. She liked simpler: generally, fewer things went wrong.

"I believe you are aware, Commander, that you should speak with Dr. Chakwas about-"

"I've got enough stuff that isn't me without adding soporifics to the list."

"Perhaps speaking with Yeo-"

Repressing a shudder at the thought – it would be a long while before she forgave Kelly for her additions to her wardrobe - "I _especially_ don't need a psychologist in my head." The last thing she needed would be to give the annoyingly tenacious woman another reason to think she had unresolved childhood issues, or whatever it was shrinks normally claimed as the source of all dysfunction.

"Psychiatrist."

"Pardon?"

"Yeoman Chambers is a psychiatrist, not a psychologist."

"There's a differ-? Nevermind. Just tell me what I'm doing wrong." She glowered sleepily at the keyboard, which stubbornly persisted in staying dim.

"You are correct in your attempt to activate the terminal, Commander."

"Then why isn't it working!" Shepherd slammed a hand through the space where, normally, the keyboard would be displayed, and gave a frustrated glare at the terminal's sleep-screen, which remained, despite her best attempts to the contrary, the horned and vaguely-sinister Cerberus symbol. The symbol's mere presence served only to aggravate her further. _Les fils de chiennes!_ Why couldn't they have just let her stay dead? _Ciel_ or _enfer_ or her next life, any or all would be easier than this, this life that, ostensibly, had all the parts of a life – a job, four walls, even a clearly defined purpose – but wasn't living. Living wasn't hiding in her quarters, pretending to sleep; living wasn't twiddling her thumbs, waiting for other people to finish dawdling over decisions on things that could not have been more obvious if she tried, while enemies were descending. Or maybe it was, and she was just being naïve expecting otherwise.

"The terminal is not working because I have currently disabled its systems."

Turning to face the holographic projection (which, while being far from humanoid in appearance, somehow disconcerted her less than her screen saver), she tried to remain calm. Tried being the operative word. All she knew was that every time she closed her eyes she could see, without fail, the Collector swarm descending on the man that would become Caretaker. Only slightly more effort could awaken the destruction warned of in the Prothean beacons carried out upon her own people, foreshadowed by Saren and _Sovereign_'s attack upon the Citadel, and begun in painful earnest during her unpleasant, but apparently not tax deductible, two year reconstruction. She had been brought back to life specifically to stop the cycle, and, now that she'd finally shaken herself of Cerberus' apron strings, her only way of doing so involved one stealth frigate and its compliment of crewmen and weaponry, unless she could convince the Alliance she hadn't been irrevocably contaminated by Cerberus or get the Council to succour their human Spectre like they would any other. As long as one or the other provided a few heavily armed ships – or an armada or two – or several of the old-style, tier-three-forbidden nuclear warheads...

Normally, thoughts of such terrible weapons would cause something to coil in her gut, but desperate times...

Shepherd hated that saying. It had been used to justify to much throughout history.

"How many planets are in the Alliance, EDI?"

"There are sixty-two colonies-"

"What about the Asari Republics?"

"The last wave of Asari expansion puts the number at one hundred and sixteen major republics a-"

"The Turian Hierarchy?"

"It-"

"What about The Salarian Union? The non-Council races? The non-Citadel species? How many inhabited worlds, space stations – space _ships_ – are there in the galaxy? How many sentient beings – that we _know_ about?"

"Even if I had access to the census records of every FTL-capable species, Commander, it is calculated that a new species discovers FTL technology approximately one hundred and eighty-six point seven-"

"And every single one of those beings, known and otherwise, will be needlessly killed if we don't find a way to destroy – let alone find – the mass relays that will let the Reapers enter our galaxy from whatever parts of dark space they've been hiding in." Though Shepherd was trying to sound like a logician coming to the conclusion of an argument, she knew, as tired as she was and as observant as the _Normandy_'s AI was, that her argument was more defensive than it had any right to be if it was the pure and simple truth. "I'll sleep when the mission is over."

"Your sleep deprivation will not help the mission, Commander."

"So your plan is to deprive me of terminal access in the hope that I'll catch up on lost sleep out of sheer boredom?"

The AI said nothing.

"It won't work," she said, putting an elbow where the keyboard would usually be displayed and resting her head upon it. More quietly, she muttered, "It never does."

* * *

a/n: _Sognando_: Dreamily

_chauves-souris:_ bat in French

_fringillidès: _finch in French

_cordon de royat: _single-cordon style of training grape vines

_Kes: _One of the five K's - or _kakars, _ie, requirements - of the Sikh faith. Essentially, its not cutting one's hair.

_fils de chiennes_ - SOBs

_Ciel/__enfer_ - Heaven/hell in French

Real life (in the form of final projects that refuse to transcode) interfered with the posting of this one. I'm still not too happy with it... but I'm happier than I was. I promise, there'll be some action soon... reveiws, as always, are appreciated.


	12. Variations on a Theme

Variations on a Theme

* * *

Brigadier General William Allan Kershing was not a pleasant man.

No, Kaidan thought, resisting the urge to look heavenward, that wasn't quite right. Will as his friends called him, and he was the sort that was gregarious by design rather than nature, and as a result he had rather more friends than man of his position and personality was wont to have was the very model of a gentlemen soldier right out of the days of imperialism, when the warships they manned used wind and sail to navigate the oceans of Earth. He was known to be unfailingly polite, unwaveringly by-the-book, and unerringly on the rise, though no marine had risen above his current rank since the Alliance Navy had been formed. He was young for a flag officer he'd only been thirty-two when they'd promoted him to his current rank and appointed him Commandant of the Alliance Marine Corps, though there was no doubt in any of the brass' minds, apparently, that he would have naturally come to hold his current position with time. The Brigadier General was also said to be highly intelligent, having at some point during his many tours of duty (in which he'd served aboard nearly every dreadnought in time, most of which he'd important positions on) attained advanced degrees in both interstellar affairs and astrometery. It was said he could speak all three Turian dialects, could take out a target from one-and-a-half miles on a windless day, and had once taken three shots to the chest, required twelve hours of surgery to repair the damage, and was seen running in the C-Sec gym less than an Earth-day after coming out of the anaesthesia.

Kershing was, in short, the ideal of what an Alliance officer according to the brass should be.

Personally, Kaidan hated him. Not, of course, that the majority of the man's subordinates didn't feel exactly the same way. Kershing was, it appeared, amazingly likeable, but only if you didn't report to him. Not for the questions his colleagues were asking either anyone in their positions would have done the same, confronted with the decision on whether or not to let but for the, well-hidden, sense of smugness behind them.

"Are you telling me, Commander," said one of the men Rear Admiral Ushio Beijers of the Twenty-Third Scout Flotilla, if Kaidan placed the moustache correctly, in a tone that betrayed severe distaste, "that you _believe_ this cock-and-bull story of Shepherd's?"

Having spent most of his career being addressed this way by men who assumed 'biotic' was another word for crazy, mentally deficient, or (one of his personal favourites, though the person who'd suggested it had been quite drunk at the time) a psychic sleeper agent who would, at some point, be reactivated by Turians whensoever they chose to finish what the First Contact War had started, Kaidan was able to ignore the less-than-subtle undertones and respond with the difference a solider was supposed to show a superior. "I admit to being... sceptical myself, sirs, but, after spending some time with Commander Shepherd, I cannot deny that she is..." Though he had spent the better part of the last four days explaining this very thing to Kershing or, more specifically, to Beijers and Beijers's direct superior, Admiral Nashwa Gerges of the Fourth Fleet, while the Kershing's adjunct, Staff Lieutenant Echevarres, scowled and took copious notes, - he still didn't know the _words_ to describe what was little more than a feeling. Telling one's superiors that one was certain of the identity of one's former CO because she _felt_ like the same person, he had decided, was not likely to be a winning argument. At great length, and with a sense of profound resignation, he finished, "...exactly as you might expect, given her history with the group."

Gerges, though the less talkative of the senior officers, latched onto his phrasing. "History, Commander?"

He'd been a Commander ever since Alchera. He should have been used to the title by now. He wasn't.

And now it seemed that, for possibly the twenty-eighth time since this series had begun four Citadel days before, when he'd received a message on his omni-tool in the middle of what his body insisted was the night for him to report to the Commandant's offices in a re-purposed C-Sec annex ASAP, he was going to have explain himself all over again. With a sigh, "She died over Alchera and was brought back to life by an organization that'd tried to kill her themselves more than once. That's-"

Rear Admiral Beijers piffled. "It seems to me that the news of Commander Shepherd's death was greatly exaggerated."

Four days ago, they'd called him in on pretence of gathering his assessment of Shepherd's mental condition prior to reinstating her. Three days, twenty-three hours, and twenty-two minutes ago, he'd realized that reinstating Shepherd wasn't their intent at all. At first, he'd merely thought it was an attempt to sandbag her: prevent her from returning to the Navy. That was all right, he supposed; stupid, but understandable given the circumstances. Most governments tended not to recruit people who may or may not have been involved in terrorist activities, even if only peripherally. By the second day, however, he realized that at least one of the brass, Beijers probably, had every intention of seeing her cashiered out of the Spectres as well if he could find a way and hidden away on a nice backwater colony (if she behaved 'reasonably' to his demands; the alternative, it would appear, would be a private room in a mental institution back on Earth) where her predilection for telling the truth could be safely contained. Kaidan assumed it was a power-play on the Rear Admiral's part like Kershing, he had been made a flag officer in the aftermath of the Siege but, unlike Kershing, Beijers wasn't the young-but-brilliant type you could forgive his unhappy promotion; rather, it seemed like Beijers' only talent was longevity, and had been promoted only because he'd been the senior-most captain, age wise, when the Navy had found itself with more openings than it had trained men.

Gerges, however, had a good ten years of service even on Anderson. Like most military minds of her generation, she had been an explorer, joining up with the fledgling International Space Agency that had preceded the Alliance Navy by some dozen years, when Earth's nation-states had been struggling to get along even that much in the turbulent time before Prothean tech was discovered on Mars and humans had learned they weren't alone. She had joined for the dream, he was sure. Everyone from that far back had joined for the dream. Strange new worlds and all of that. And then she'd found out the final frontier was a lot more crowded than anticipated. And a lot more dangerous. The ISA quickly ceased to be the last refuge of scientists and researchers longing for a peace Earth had, even now, yet to truly achieve and become what every military eventually became: a place of soldiers, and of war. Not that he knew any specifics on the Admiral. For all he knew, she could've been as military as they came, whatever the holovids made her generation out to be. But he _did_ know that she was on the far side of sixty and starting to look the part; that stop-loss measures had been put into effect at the highest-echelons of power; and that, from the way the Admiral kept fingering the pendant of a necklace otherwise hidden under her dress blues, Gerges might actually _fear_ Shepherd being brought back into the fold.

If it had been anyone but Shepherd, he would've called the very idea ridiculous... but the woman was chaos given legs, and things followed in her wake that were rarely considered beneficial or politic to the people in charge.

And Kershing _continued_ to stand at parade rest off to the side, in a partitioned area off the small conference room Kaidan and the others occupied, eyes never leaving the half-dozen or more vid-screens and the silent, flickering images displayed on each. Occasionally, for no readily apparent reason, he would turn up the volume with wave of his omni-tool, and the sounds would drift into the room where, ostensibly, Kaidan was being debriefed, and his questioners would go silent and motion for him to do the same until the moment had passed. He'd not said one word to anyone during the four days Kadian'd spent in his office and yet, inexplicably, Kaidan knew that, whatever Gerges and Beijers' personal interests in Shepherd's re-enlistment might be, Kershing was the man in charge. He didn't want her back, and would, it appear, continue down this line of action until Kaidan gave him a reason to justify his refusal of her application, despite the dip in recruitment the Alliance was suffering.

It was for this reason and this reason alone Kaidan hated the man. It was a simple, almost primal hate. Shepherd had prevented _Sovereign_ from destroying the Citadel. She had destroyed a Reaper-in-the-Making. She had not joined Cerberus. She had not betrayed anyone. She had not lied. Anyone who disliked her had to be the enemy; the idea that anyone on their side could _not_ want her was absurd to him: even on Horizon-

And he was being an idiot again, and the handful of hours he'd spent with Shepherd was all it had taken. It had been one thing to see her on Horizon, hidden from closer inspection by both concealing armour and the cloying presence of all the dead and lost about them, but it was another thing entirely to spend a handful of hours alone with her, being allowed to hear every personal and potentially destructive word her lawyer had to say, able to see beyond certainty that she was the same person, body and soul, that she was exactly the same as she was before. Except of course-

Except that she was no longer his. That she'd never been his, or he hers, or anything of that nature. Whatever they'd had, it'd long been lost, however much she seemed to be unchanged from that last moment he'd seen her on the original _Normandy, _checking the seals on her suit as she turned away from him and ordered that he evacuate the crew, that relationship was over, and he was a fool to want to try, well, whatever it was they had again. The only sign he'd been given that she might think of him differently than any other solider who'd served beneath her was in Pontar Sul's office, when she'd typed her Spectre security codes into the fourth pad she'd been given and told him to find whatever he needed for the re-enlistment form while she sat there, obviously lost in thought. He knew her well enough to know that, normally, when she allowed herself to remember (which, admittedly, wasn't often, or so he felt), it was in dark, secluded places where no one could see her pain. She'd even spoken to him of Océane; he'd the idea that she'd not so much as said her cousin's name since the Blitz. In the end, however, Shepherd was just a friend, his former CO. That was all.

Even if he had put himself down as her next-of-kin when, after a long pause, she seemed to have forgotten the question entirely, caught up in the memories of those who she should have been able to list instead.

"With all do respect, ma'am," he said, his tone bordering on court marshal, he knew, but he couldn't take this any more. "you don't know the hell what you're talking about."

Straight-laced as they came, Gerges let slip an_, "Ana aasifah?" _which would have, had been thinking about it, caused him to pause more than the words themselves. The Alliance Navy in particular the brass made a point of speaking the _lingua franca_; some sort of misplaced way of making the humanity seem more unified than it was while also serving to alienate some of the more separatist human interest groups. _Like Shepherd's family_, he dimly thought in the recesses of his brain currently not involved in his display of righteous fury. Or, rather, suppressing what could easily become a display of righteous biotic fury. No matter what else happened, he had to remember he was a biotic. Biotics could not get angry, could not allow themselves to loose control. Loss of control was dangerous. People could be injured, killed even.

He breathed deeply before trying more calmly, "Talk to her. Ask her something, anything. She can barely remember that two years are have passed for the rest of us no one could fake that level of confusion, or-"

"Is she unstable?" Beijers asked with something akin to glee.

"Hell no."

The Rear Admiral bristled, and this gave Kaidan a sick sense of satisfaction himself.

Then came a new voice, friendlier than one would've expected and with what might've been a slight southern lilt to it, saying simply, "Good."

Kaiden, Beijers, and Gerges all spun in their seats, turning towards the screen-filled alcove from which Kershing was now emerging. He'd never heard the Brigadier General speak before, outside of the occasional news-vid and, while his tone bespoke the calm, gentleman-solider persona he'd obviously worked so hard to cultivate, there was something about him – perhaps the fact that, impeccably pressed dress uniform and all, he looked a to be in better shape than Kaidan himself was, or maybe the slight and rather disconcerting shine to his shaved head – that was hard and cold, like military men of a distinctly different era. His skin was darker than was usually seen these days, since globalization had seen to it that few parts of Earth were farther than a few hours from anywhere else, though a pair of ice-blue eyes and a deep brown pencil moustache betrayed his mixed ancestry. He was neither tall nor short, neither smiled nor frowned as he entered the room proper, and appeared to have no opinion of any sort as to the goings on of the past few days, though they had, seemingly, been called on Kershing's order.

The man had only said one word to him, and already Kaidan found his loathing of the man growing. What kind of man just _stood_ there and let one of his soldiers (albeit several rungs down the ladder) be debriefed by his superiors without comment, watching news-vids as if-

Anger wasn't going to help him now. He had to remember that. But he'd have felt a hell lot better if Kershing showed some _emotion_ – any emotion – about the whole situation.

He didn't. Though he continued on what, in another person, might be called an affable southern drawl, none of the seeming emotion in his words quite reached his eyes. "I'll be completely honest with you, Commander Alenko," he said, coming to parade rest behind a chair towards the middle of the table, his hands clasped behind his back in a way that made Kaidan wonder if the man ever relaxed, even around his friends, "I think Commander Shepherd's ideas concerning the disappearing colonists and machine intelligences are a load of horse shit." His words belayed anger, frustration, even a touch of private amusement, but the could be talking about the environmental controls for all his features seemed concerned. "If you've read what the Alliance has managed to pull together about Mindoir and those 'Eleventh Guru' Sikh radicals that run the place, you'll see they're no more than another group of xenophobic nativists content to wrap themselves in a patina of religion until one of them finds the balls to pull another stunt like they did at Hellas Pantina in '58. But," a suggestion of distaste in his tone, not one whiff of humanity reaching his eyes, which continued to stare straight at Kaidan, as if hoping he'd look away and not notice what was so clearly not there to be seen, "whatever her personal issues, I won't deny that Helene gets the job done."

It took a moment for Kaidan to remember that Shepherd had a first name and that, occasionally, people used it – and in that same moment, he noticed a shadow of something cross the Brigadier General's features, though it passed so quickly he half-thought he'd imagined it. After all, if anger couldn't cause a reaction in the man, the mere mention of Shepherd's name shouldn't-

A dozen ideas had already formed before he clamped a lid on his thoughts and forced them fully aside as he continued to listen to the Commandant. It shouldn't matter if Kershing had once counted Shepherd among the ranks of his devotees at all, if that was even what the look was about. She was personable. She had to have friends. It shouldn't bother him in the least if she had any, and it wasn't his business at all if she'd once upon a time done something as asinine as form a friendship – or more-

He pushed the thoughts further aside. It wasn't any of his business. It wasn't any of his business in the least. And he was probably wrong anyway. It could have been distaste for the way Shepherd got things done, which was, most assuredly, _not_ by the book. It couldn't been anger at what he was being forced to say. It could've been anything at all.

But why then had he used her _first_ name?

Kaidan did not like the implications at all.

"We've decided to give the _Passchendaele_ to Captain Nichols, as intended."

"Aye, sir." That was to be expected. It looked like he'd be spending another few months shadowing Anderson. At least the _Normandy_ was, for better or for worse, a privately-owned ship and the Navy couldn't take it away from Shepherd... Maybe he'd even discovered just how far an L2 could go, and he should resign his commission before they forced him out... Maybe Shepherd's offer of joining up with her and her team was still open; now that Cerberus was out of the picture...

"There's a Granada-class frigate on its way here from the Yandoa shipyards, fresh off the assembly lines. We're calling it the _Masada:_ four decks, sixty-two Javelin torpedo launchers, crew compliment of forty-seven, minus the senior staff, and it should be one hell of a mover. The _Hyderabad_ is bringing its XO and CMO from Arcturus. She'll be here in five days."

"Sir?"

"We're giving you the _Masada_, Commander. I may think this whole charade is nothing more than a religiously-fueled delusion, but the Council has asked us to help Commander Shepherd on her mission – and the Fleet Admiral agrees with them." There was another shadow, a longer one, at the mention of the Commander-in-Chief of the Alliance Navy, but at this point Kaidan was too stunned to make anything even of that. They were giving him a ship, but why? All the same reasons he'd shouldn't have ever been put in charge of the _Passchendaele_ remained the same. "The _Masada_ and _Hyderabad_ were both slated for the Fourth Fleet, but Admiral Gerges," he inclined his head towards the woman, "has generously allowed us to put them under Shepherd's command – for now.

"Since we're being completely honest, Commander Alenko, I'm going to tell you to your face that I don't like the idea of a biotic being put in charge of starship, especially one whose been involved with the... borrowing of two different frigates against explicit order, but Shepherd trusts you and so does Anderson. So we're going to give you _Masada_ to keep Shepherd happy and your going to smile and let Commander Krueger run things. Do we have an understanding, Commander Alenko?"

Kaidan nodded, still trying to figure out what game Kershing was playing. One didn't need four days of intense questioning, after all, to tell someone they were giving them a frigate, and one of the new Granada-class ones too. There were two others in the class, the _Granada_ and _Saragarhi_, and he remembered all of the issues that had arisen during their launches, most of them involving experimental weaponry that might or might not exist. You didn't give command of a heavily-armed frigate like the _Masada_ or a more-heavily-armed cruiser like the _Hyderabad_ to a person you thought might be telling tales, no matter what the brass might say. Not without expectations of your own.

The other shoe came an instant later, from Gerges herself, and with significant emotion in her voice. "Your only task is to obtain the records on _how_ Cerberus resurrected Commander Shepherd and return with that information – and whatever technology relating to the process you can find – as soon as possible."

* * *

a/n: I apologize for the delay. A massive case of writer's block, combined with the usual real life stuff, kept me stuck at about 15K for a while. Luckily, though, the muse returned this afternoon... (and if there are any random chinese charectors, missing quotations marks, or missing words, my computer has developed a tendency to add those in to my .docs and I can't seem to rid myself of this issue).

ISA - International Space Agency (non-cannon): multi-national group, 2136-2149, formed with the intention of "seeking out new life and new civilizations," etc. Folded into the Alliance Navy when formed in 2149. I believe I got the name from _Farscape_, and the idea of the group itself is somewhat similiar to Starfleet in _Star Trek: Enterprise_ in its first two seasons, before the Xindi weapon forced the militarization of _Enterprise_ and the Romulan War did the same with the rest the fleet... (Yes, I am a syfy junkie).

_Ana aasifah _- "Excuse Me?" (when something rude is said) in Arabic, feminine version

_Masada_ - Famous last stand, site of the Seige of Masada in 72 during the First Jewish-Roman War; ended in the Jews (the defenders) commiting mass suicide

_Hyderabad _- capitol of the south-western Indian state of Andhra Pradesh

_Saragarhi _- another famous last stand: 21 sikh defenders vs. 10,000 attacking Afghans and Orakazi (a Pashtun tribe) in 1897 in modern-day Pakistan during the Tirah; all defenders were killed


	13. The Second Movement: Ziehen

The Second Movement

* * *

_Ziehen_

* * *

In the early days of the Alliance, before the _SSV Everest_ had become the first dreadnought in the fleet, the defensive strength of the humanity had rested on a group of twelve cruisers known collectively as the Geneva-class. From 2157 until their decommissionings in the late '70s, they had been the mighty arm behind the human expansion. The _Hyderabad_ was the most famous of these, and so, a dozen years later, when the committees were looking for names for the new Medina-classes that would, once again, serve as the stick for the Alliance's "walk softly" policy in the Skyllian Verge, they christened the flagship the _SSV_ _Hyderabad-B_. Under the command of Captain Richard Pierce (a man who could trace his family involvement in the military, by war, back to Operation: Cast Lead, though no one had determined exactly which side it was his forebears had fraught for), the _Hyderabad_ was assigned to patrol the Alliance-Batarian border. The first one hundred eighty-nine days out of spacedock, the ship seemed to personify the dreams of the men who had designed her, who had seen the destruction at the Siege of the Citadel and vowed _never again_.

On the hundred ninetieth day of its first tour, the _Hyderabad_ was attacked by three Batarian interceptors at the midway point between the Tereshkova and Hong systems of the Armstrong Nebula. One hundred seventy-nine of its three hundred eleven member crew was lost; Captain Pierce, as well as the CoS and CMO, were among the fallen. It was later determined by an investigative team that, had the the late Chief of Security had been preforming his duties, he would have known that the strange sensor readings the Ops Officer, Lieutenant Allis Nordin, had picked up in the moments before the accident were a new kind of cloaked mine he'd received a report about two weeks before. The late Lt. Collins never passed that report along to the other senior officers. The late Lt. Collins had never even read the initial report. He'd also been amongst the first to die when one of the cloaked mines attached to the cruiser next to one of the more important power relays on 3-deck, causing life support to cut out almost immediately to the five decks it served. Only the members of first watch in the secure areas (the ones whose redundant systems were located on decks above and below the blast zone) at their posts on the bridge or in the command centre or in the heavily shielded engineering had survived.

A month-long retrofit at Arcturus Station had fixed the structural issues but, sitting in the officer's lounge of the _Hyderabad_, she knew the problems that led to the warship being caught unawares in the first place remained.

_Warship_. Shepherd almost snorted at the thought. Yes, the cruiser was the most heavily gunned thing out there - she'd taken a look at the specs for the Medina-classes and, while her understanding of tech could be compared to your average eighth-grader's knowledge nineteenth century Russian literature, even she could tell that, for it's size, the thing was practically a-bristle with turrets, cannons, and (her personal favourites) a pair of two hundred twenty-two metre guns that could accelerate a fifteen kilo slug to point eight percent the speed of light. Apparently, the news-vids had gone crazy when pics of the ship were released and, while, officially, no word had been said on their yield, anyone with a background in physics and access to good enough vids could make an educated guess. Or so she'd been told. Physics, like most the sciences, was one class her school in _Lumière __Sainte_ had never exactly gotten around to.

There were a lot of things the school had never gotten around to teaching. Océane had tried...

...and she tried not to think of Océane Nageena Shepherd, a.k.a. Servicewoman First Class Margot Neela, whom Pontar Sul's med-tech's had determined was most definitely _not_ the mother (or, as she'd had carefully explained to her, _father_, as the donor of genetic materials in Asari reproduction should properly be called) of the young Renisa E'ste, lately of Ilium. No, the girl's donor parent was most definitely a human whose ancestors were Western European, mostly, with at least one grandparent each worth of Middle Eastern and South Asian , but that human _wasn't_ Océane.

It was someone much closer to Helene than that.

That was another thing Shepherd was trying her best not to think about but, sitting in this overly decadent officer's lounge while waiting for the basic mission brief to be over, so she could get down to the heart of the matter. But she was sick and tired of thinking about the Reapers and the Collectors and the threat they proved to the galaxy, and so she let her Operation XO handle the background briefing and was allowing herself to gaze thoughtlessly out the window at the lazily-drifting stars. Gazing thoughtlessly, though, seemed to be a harder skill to master than Samara had made it seem, and her mind kept on straying back to this Renisa E'ste, her dead mother, Alisa, and her plotting aunt, Aniela.

She didn't know much about biology, but she knew enough to know that cousins like her and Océane shared about a quarter of their genes. The only people she'd be more closely related to would be her parents, her brothers, and (though she was a little uncertain on this one) her uncles. They had all been dead since '70. Renisa had been conceived in '78. _She_ certainly wasn't the child's father, so...

Shepherd wasn't too sure she liked the implications of that thought, and quickly forced her mind elsewhere. It was hard, her mind sluggish from the fifteen hours of sleep she'd managed to cobble together over the past fortnight, but she managed in time to turn what senses weren't concentrating on the engine cleaner the _Hyderabad_ called coffee elsewhere... She'd forgotten how foul coffee aboard warships could be...

She remembered once, in early '80, one of her first interactions with then-Commander Anderson aboard the _S__ã__o__ Paulo_. That cruiser had been Warsaw-class, smaller, with only two hundred souls, half of them marines. Anderson had been the company commander – the marines' OIC – and she'd been fresh out of N7 school, attached to the cruiser's third strike group. After eighteen months on Arcturus Station, she was having trouble sleeping now that she could see the stars moving out her bedroom window, and so, after several days, had given up trying. She'd gone to one of the conference rooms to sit and, well, do anything but think about being in space and how much she missed her early days at Sidon, before her superiors had realized she was wasted on grunt security work and browbeat the XO of the _Argincourt_ to take her on. Instead of finding an empty room, though, she'd found Anderson, struggling to keep awake through another day's worth of paperwork. The moment she saw him Shepherd had ducked back through the door, unwilling to face what she expected was yet another senior officer who thought she was nothing more than a publicity stunt, someone the brass could feed to the media so the realities of the Blitz could be ignored, and considered everything from her Star of Terra to her slot at N7 school as undeserved. He _had_ seen her, though, and invited her in. He'd talked to her, person to person, like no one had since Océane, and shared his personal stash of coffee to boot. Before the month was up, he'd put her in charge of her strike group. At the end of the first year, they were calling her his protégée. By the end of his tour, when they'd given her his job and moved him to _Ch__â__l__ons_, he'd done more for her and meant more to Shepherd than her own father... She'd never told him this... God, she should have told him this. She hoped he knew. She would tell him, one day, after the Reaper threat was over after, so that, if she died, he'd not have to bear that weight.

With a sigh and another great effort, she pushed her thoughts off of coffee and death and ran a finger under the collar of her uniform.

Her uniform.

Shepherd should have been happy the Alliance had reinstated her. She should have been thrilled that her grandstanding to the Council had paid off and that she wasn't going to spend the rest of her life as an outlaw from Citadel space. She should have been beyond ecstatic that they'd named her _CO_ of the _Hyderabad_ and placed Kaidan's _Masada_ under her as part of what the brass was optimistically calling Operation: Ragnarök. She should even have been happy (and admittedly was, most of the time) at the thick, woollen material of her service uniform, which had helped cutback on the number of layers she needed to keep from feeling like she was freezing all the damn time. But a damn _service_ uniform was the last thing she needed at the moment, God-damn the rules and God-damn the regulations about what was considered appropriate wear for flag officers. Because they just had to go and make her a flag officer now, to keep up with the little charade the brass was spreading and no one actually appeared to believe that she'd been doing some sort of undercover work in some undefined place for the past two years and had done it so well (which was to say, more quietly than she usually managed things, with no bombs or wars or news coverage of any sort) that she'd earned a promotion out of it.

"Major?"

It took Shepherd a moment to realize that Kaidan had finished addressing the eleven new senior officers that, despite all good reasons to the contrary, were under her command now, and that he was trying to get _her_ attention. Major indeed. She'd been dead when they'd made her a Staff Commander and, now, wearing the three gold bars of an O-6, she felt like she hadn't quite earned the right to be called Major, or even anything at all.

It made her less than happy when she remembered, after studying the service records of the officers in front of her, that most of them probably didn't deserve their ranks either. From the _Hyderabad_, only Commanders Singh and Travers – her XO and CoE respectively – seemed to have skills and experience needed for a cruiser posting, let alone one that was going to rate the hazardous duty pay this one was going to. Commander Ye, Lieutenant Jurado, and Lieutenant Nordin seemed capable enough, but were as much the victims of the Navy's need for bodies as the rest and, in better times, should have been at least a rank lower. And Lieutenant Reed... if she'd ever been that young, Shepherd didn't know how her COs had stood it. It was the same problem on the _Masada_, where even Kaidan was billeted above his comfort level, with his XO, Commander Kruger, the only one she felt might've still held her position if this had been two years earlier.

She set down her coffee and stood, straightening her heavy jacket as she did in a way that was already becoming habitual. Kaidan offered her a small, amused smile at that and took the seat she'd just vacated. To her surprise, he even took the coffee she'd left perched on the arm (and made a face at the taste of it, but drank it none the less). It reminded her of _Normandy_, the original _Normandy_, in that comparatively blissful month between the Siege and Alchera, and she found herself blinking back tears.

Lack of sleep was obviously turning her into a fool. Obviously. The past was the past was the past... and the future was waiting for her at the end of this briefing, if these children playing at being soldiers hadn't shit themselves before she finished explaining their mission.

* * *

Their mission, should they choose to accept it, was suicide, pure and simple. He had told them, in the most plain and un-exaggerated language he knew, exactly what Saren had done two years ago and what the Collectors had been doing since. He had done his best to take the panic that he'd felt just reading the _Normandy SR-2_'s reports and ignore it; done his best to ignore the haughty glares the ex-Cerberus operative Miranda, here in her official capacity as "civilian contractor," had been shooting him from the get-go from her position by the door. He'd even managed to (mostly) ignore the almost painful look of loss that Shepherd was hiding from everyone else by sitting apart from the people who, in other times, would have been her hand-picked and most trusted officers.

That didn't, however, change the fact that they _weren't _their - her, he quickly corrected - trusted officers, or even picked beyond the fact that they'd been what was available seven months previously when the _Hyderabad_ had deployed. Nor did it change the fact that these men and women, like the three hundred one elsewhere on the cruiser and the forty-seven waiting for him on the _Masada_, had no choice but to accept their part in Operation: Ragnarök. Or the fact that none of them seemed to have believed a word he'd been saying.

It was up to Shepherd now.

She did not disappoint.

"I know you think I'm crazy," she began without hesitation. It was only from long study and experience and memories a saner man would have tucked away two years ago that he noted everything about her that screamed how uncomfortable she was to be addressing this group. It wasn't nerves - it was never nerves - but he could tell she was tired, physically and mentally. Had it been two years earlier, he would have gone up to her the moment the conference ended and cajoled her into going to bed by whatever means necessary and she would have, eventually, remembering how poorly she seemed to take care of herself, thanked him for his concern, as if it should be surprising that anyone might care for her. But now the most he could do for her was make jokes about her uniform, and even that was hard when you looked down and took into account the number of ribbon bars under the pair of stylized crests that marked her as both Spectre and N7. And then, when you had gotten over _that_ combination, another pause was necessary when you realized that her yeoman had figured out how to place _both_ Stars of Terra that Shepherd had on the uniform, and that, in addition to the fact that the medals had to add at least five kilos to the jacket, the woman who wore it was not someone you wanted to see angry. Or, he reflected, crazy.

He thanked whatever deity might be listening that he was the only L2 on this mission and one of only five biotics, minus whomever Shepherd had on the _Normandy, _aboard either ship. All but a first lieutenant were stationed on the _Masada _with him, where he could keep an eye on them.

If he didn't go crazy first, that was. It had nearly been a week since Kershing had given him his "assignment," but he'd still not found a way to tell Shepherd about the Commandant's machinations. There were plenty of good reasons for this, not least among these that, between suddenly finding himself in charge (for real, this time) of a frigate and the repair teams crawling all over _Normandy_, he'd scarcely seen her since the day she'd threatened the Council with a PR shit-storm. And this was something he most definitely did _not _want to breathe word about on insecure channels. The cynic in him wouldn't have put it past the brass to have bugged _Hyderabad_ and the realist knew with certainty that their repair crews had done the same to _Normandy_. No, he couldn't breathe a word of it until he could speak to Shepherd alone, away from any surveillance equipment, and it was anyone's guess when that would be. Though he and the senior staff of both Alliance vessels were on the cruiser now, it was only for this briefing. It was the first time he'd seen her in days.

When they'd left the Citadel twelve hours before, her only order – over the comm at that – had been to keep up, and Joker had eventually lead them to the Pax system of the Hades Gamma cluster, where he parked them in L2 orbit of the planet Veles and the meeting was called. He couldn't say he didn't understand her reasoning, but, God, it felt terrible to be out of the loop, to be trusted even less then the _Hyderabad_'s XO, Commander Singh, seemed to trust her. He'd seen the look Singh wore before. Hell, it was the same look Kaidan would have given Kershing and his ink-monkeys if he thought he could've gotten away with it. It irked him to see that look directed at Shepherd...

Which reminded him of the main reason he'd been avoiding the new Major: the insanity she provoked in everyone she met, which would progress until you could no longer remember the person you'd been before she'd crossed your path, was coming back. It was stupid, it was pathetic, and several other things besides, but he'd not felt as awkward and uncertain as a teenager as he did around Shepherd. Oh, the solider in him respected her, considered her unequivocally the best marine he'd ever seen, and would (and had) follow her into hell if she asked it... but the one the part of him that remembered that, for all she stayed the same, she was no longer the person that had made her Anderson's hand-picked successor. That person would never have blackmailed the Council, or, when the brass wanted her to pick a crew to replace the ex-Cerberus on _Normandy, _told Admiral Gerges- Well, needless to say, he'd not been aware anyone's face could loose colour so quickly. He knew that she wasn't exactly as she had been, but, God, she was so close to it that made it-

The only solution, he'd decided, was to pretend like nothing had ever happened between them, that they were merely soldiers who'd once served together and now found themselves serving together again. Which, he always carefully reminded himself, was how it was bound to have ended up, even if Alchera hadn't happened. And if it was hard to squelch the concern he felt for her, or the distaste he felt at the Marine Commandant's plans for her, or the unreasonable rage that rose in him at the memory of said Commandant's use of her first name, it was his problem, and Shepherd was burdened enough without having to deal with a crazy ex-lover who couldn't quite remember he was supposed to be ex.

Which brought him to the real reason he hadn't told Shepherd about Kershing or his "debriefing" with Beijers and Gerges: Kaidan didn't trust himself to be alone with her. Whether it was his own L2-caused insanities or the magical web of charisma she wove, it as better for everyone involved for him to just keep away. When he got the chance, he could bring it up to one of the med-techs she had on _Normandy_ – Doctor Chakwas or the Salarian he'd heard was aboard, Professor Solus – and get them to give him just enough to keep Kershing happy without betraying anyone...

It would be easier, admittedly, if he had an idea why Kershing wanted the knowledge. The only practical application for the medical knowledge was to bring people back from the dead. Sure, there were probably bits and pieces of it they could use more practically – a new method for organ regeneration, perhaps – that Cerberus had developed on its own that the Alliance could use, but the tech for reanimation couldn't just develop in a microcosm overnight. There had to be thousands of people working on all parts of the project – from organ regeneration on up, to whatever else Cerberus had done to her to bring her back – that could be more easily gotten. This, Kaidan assumed, meant that, whatever reason Kershing had for wanting the knowledge, it wasn't medical. It had to do with the resurrection itself and that, to Kaidan, meant only two things: either the Alliance had someone they were willing to foot the bill to bring back, or someone out there was looking for a way to reverse the process.

Which gave him another good reason to tell anyone but Shepherd what he'd been given the _Masada_ to do.

"Miranda over there assures me that that's not the case – and, believe me, she has a vested interest in my sanity. I can give you more data, show you more vids, and tell you what really happened at every battle and on every planet and beyond every mass relay until I'm blue in the face, but I know that none of you will truly believe me until you see the truth with your own eyes. So I am going to have to ask you to trust that the Alliance and the Council knew what they were doing when they assigned you to this mission. The Reapers are out there, waiting in dark space for a gateway to be opened for them back into our galaxy. We don't know much about them, though I suspect, given their proclivities, they were once like the Geth, built to serve organics before attaining sentience. Those creators, whoever they were, tried to destroy the Reapers, and the Reapers destroyed them instead; for countless millennia since, they've allowed more civilizations and species then we can imagine to reach this point, to find the mass relays and evolve until they decide that they can go no further and commit something so far beyond mere genocide that there are no words in any language to describe it. _If_ we are too late, _if_ they are allowed to activate one of their master relays, it won't just be humanity they destroy. They will hunt every last one of us – human, Turian, Salarian, take your pick – down until each and every one of us are dead; they will raze every planet we touch and rape the wreckage for every centime they're worth, until the only thing left of humanity will be what remains of our genome in those of us they collect to turn into the latest additions to their slave pool.

"But we will not be too late. This time, we know they're coming." Her voice rose with passion; both her hands fell, open-palmed, to grasp the edge of the conference table, "We – humanity and the Council – we _defeated_ their armada at Citadel. We _spurned_ their slaves at Horizon. We _denied _them our genes beyond Omega 4. We have done what _no other civilization_ has managed to do before. We _will_ stop them.

"This is how."

Shepherd pulled a data disc from her pocket, then and slid it into the reader built into the desk. He didn't know if anyone else caught her look of relief when it worked or recognized it for what it was, but he did. The eleven seated around her seemed to be caught up in their own little worlds, their faces betraying mixtures of fear and determination, disbelief and resignation, anger and comprehension. One or two – Commander Travers and Lieutenant Reed, both part of _Hyderabad_'s compliment – had the same look of dawning horror Kaidan fancied he himself had worn throughout Shepherd's conversation with Vigil on Ilos, and he knew they were convinced, others – _Hyderabad_'s Singh and his own XO, Commander Kruger – seemed to be more sceptical than ever, while the rest were somewhere in between. (It seemed a universal constant that the higher up the food chain you put someone, the harder it was to change their minds. Singh, as far as he could tell, had been shooting dark looks at his CO since the moment she'd stepped aboard for the sole reason that she believed _Sovereign _to have been anything other than a Geth dreadnought, and Kruger had been doing the same to him, albeit with rather more feminine subtly.)

The Major noticed his amusement at her technical naïvety and gave him a Look before gesturing at the galaxy map that hidden holo-projectors had placed in the air above the table. "The Council was kind enough to provide us with the locations of all the relays they deactivated after the Rachni Wars, relays from which no exploratory team has ever returned, and every other relay that, for one reason or another, has never been mapped." She pressed something on her omni-tool, and several hundred (if not more) of tiny coloured dots sprang up throughout the starfield. Another command, and sections of the map turned space white – the portion of galaxy controlled by the the Asari Republics, - and the stars and, in most cases, the marked relays within it, disappeared from those parts of the map; others turned yellow – the Salarian Union - or purple – the Turian Hierarchy, – with the same phenomena happening within. While this was happening, some of the marked relays outside the coloured quarters – the dark blue ones – faded away, until only two score dots remained. Seven were within Council territory. The rest fell into one of two categorizes: either on innermost edge of habitable space, before the distortions caused by the galactic core made further exploration difficult, or else on the fringes of the galactic disk.

In the silence that lingered as Shepherd lowered her omni-tool, Kaidan found himself unable to do anything but grip the now-empty cup he held. He couldn't remember drinking the coffee. He barely recalled that the cup had been here when he'd sat down and that he'd taken Shepherd's seat. He knew the situation should have been hopeless, yet felt a stirring of (of all things) _hope_ within him. The Commander's eyes lifted and found the Major's. She had no idea she was doing it, but she'd done it again, and the net she'd cast was tightening.

"I've collected the best and brightest the galaxy has to offer aboard the _Normandy_. They're working on some ideas on how to destroy the relays once we find them... But, first, we have to find them. We're working on the idea that the mass relays have to be larger or otherwise more powerful than normal to connect to partners in dark space or the galactic centre. _Normandy's _SO was able to pick up some... unusual readings during our jumps through the Omega 4 relay and from it's partner near the core. I'll let Mordin give you the details, Lieutenant Reed," she addressed _Hyderabad_'s science officer, "so I don't bungle the explanation, but, for various reasons, these twenty-two relays are known to be different than other primary relays or there is so little data on them that we wouldn't know if they've ever even been activated without going and taking a look. Which is what we're going to do. Now, I know that none of our ships are exactly science vessels, but it's going to take time to make something that could take out a relay, so we're going to kill two birds with one stone and upgrade your systems while we do some... investigation. Since _Hyderabad_ seems to have it's armoury in hand, I'm going to start by sending Garrus over to you," Shepherd found and caught his eyes again, delaying for a moment he might have imagined before turning to her own officers, "to get the _Masada_'s battery up to par. Tali – my engineer – has some ideas for _Hyderabad_'s engines-"

"Say no more," Commander Travers interrupted (and if he caught the look Commander Singh shot him when he did, he paid it no mind). "I've heard of the wonders these Quarian machinists can do; we'd be delighted to have her."

Major Shepherd graced him with a smile before removing her data disc from the reader. "Then I'll schedule the upgrades to begin at 0800 tomorrow. I suggest everyone get some rest while you can; it's going to get crazy fast once things get going. Dismissed."

Almost as one, the eleven stood, Kaidan's own four coming to meet him so they could head as one to the shuttle that was waiting to take them back to _Masada _as _Hyderabad_'s disappeared in ones and twos, its Lieutenant Nordin practically running out as she rushed to relieve the senior enlisted officer on the bridge, while he saw Commander Travers quietly cajoling Lieutenant Reed and Doctor Piesse into joining him in the mess for a late night snack.

As Kaidan and the others – Commanders Kruger and Lapierre, Lieutenant Oosterkamp, and Doctor Greene – made to follow Travers out, Shepherd held out a hand. "Hang on a sec? Singh, I'm going with Miranda and Alenko to the Docking Bay; I've not had a chance to check out the lower levels since coming aboard. Care to join us?"

Commander Singh, who had been moving as if to use the exit on the far side of the room and, barely pausing, replied in the negative with a hauteur that reminded Kaidan all too well of Ambassador Udina.

"Your loss," the Major sighed, and gestured towards the door.

Their party was halfway out when both Miranda and Shepherd paused, the latter offering stiff and incomprehensible, "_Khalsa so-i jo nindaa ti-aagay," _in reply to whatever it was her XO had said, and remained quiet for their journey to the lift. It, like Kershing's use of her first name, bothered him more than he cared to admit.

Eight floors later, Kaidan, against his better judgement, found himself asking, "What the hell was that about?" which startled her enough that she answered.

"He called me a _bemajhab_ – an apostate. I was merely reminding him that heresy is in the eye of the beholder."

"Is he-?"

"From Mindoir?" she gave a small laugh as she keyed in an entry code to docking bay three. "No. I'm pretty sure he's not _L'onzième__ Gourou _either, just a traditional Sikh. I'm curious to see how much energy he wastes on it before he realizes this bulkhead has more religious feeling than I do. Think I'll get Donnelly to start a betting pool on it." She sighed and offered her hand. "Didn't get a chance to congratulate you earlier. From a twenty-year-old marauder to a new Granada in less than a month. At this rate, they'll have you commanding the _Yushan_ before the year's out."

His hand went to the back of his neck, praying the heat he felt there wasn't translating into a blush. "I'm not so sure. You know how things stall up after Thanksgiving, and it's already mid-November."

"Is it?" She seemed to be trying to remember something. "Oh, yes. You'd think it'd be the two years I end up missing the most, but, no, it's the twelve days that keep on throwing me. By Easter then, you think?"

Kaidan realized she was still holding out her hand and, feeling warmer still, took it. God, how could she _still_ do this to him? It had been two years – two years, three months, and twenty-eight days, to be specific. He should have gotten over this. He should've moved on. Letting go, "If the mission's done by then, we'll see."

"We'll try for Easter then. Never understood the holiday myself, but those who do, I understand, like to be home for it." Easily, in that way she had, she offered her hand to the officer beside him. "It's usually in April, isn't it, Lieutenant Oosterkamp?"

Nervously, "It'll be 9 April next year, I think."

"Five months then, give or take. Have any family, Lieutenant?"

"Just the parents, ma'am."

"On Earth?"

"On the Faroe Islands – the north Atlantic, between the UK and Iceland."

"Never been to Earth... What about you, Commander?" She turned on Lapierre, "You from Earth?"

"Spacer. The family ran trade between Sol and Demeter; my sister and her husband still do."

"Engineer. Should've known; most of you seem to be spacers."

"Not Jim – that's Commander Travers, ma'am. He's the best engineer I've ever seen, and he's from Virginia. Served with him on the _Saratoga_ three years back; the man can do wonders with an FTL. Managed to take us to point eight seven the speed of light for six hours running once. It was... amazing. Thought I'd died and gone to heaven."

"Bryon!" his ship's doctor interrupted, elbowing the engineer in the ribs, "Think before words spew out of your mouth, please." Greene rolled her eyes at Shepherd. "Men."

"If I remembered anything of being dead, I might mind. But since I keep on forgetting myself that I was, it's no big deal. Just try not to bruise him too badly; we're going to need him before this is all over."

With a shrug, Doctor Greene climbed into the shuttle after Lapierre and Oosterkamp. "I can always patch him back together again when I'm done."

Shepherd turned to Kruger next, offering a hand and a congratulations – apparently his XO's promotion to Staff Commander had only come through two weeks before – but the woman walked past it without a word, following the CMO inside without giving any indication she'd seen the Major at all.

"I'll talk to her," Kaidan told her, inexplicably reminded as he did of his mother, Lian, saying similar to his father after so many teenage confrontations in the years when his parents were still together. And now, his mind also seemed to remind him, he wasn't talking to either parent. He'd never even met his half-sister, Te Min. She'd be turning eighteen early next year. It was so strange, to have all these people who once meant so much to him – who were supposed to mean so much to him – that no longer did. If he died, Lian and her new family certainly wouldn't care; his father probably wouldn't either. The only people who might would be some of his friends from previous postings, and he hadn't made many of those at Caleston or Cambacérès with the place his head had been in. A thought, telling him that Ash had a mother and sisters who missed her, crawled up from the dark place he kept it and ones like it. It refused to go away, whispering insidiously that, despite what Shepherd might've said about him being an officer and a stable L2 and invaluable to the Alliance, she'd chosen to save him because of their relationship. Now, it was telling him, he didn't even have that; his life should have belonged to someone else.

Shepherd only sighed.

With nothing else to say, he climbed into the shuttle and took the seat nearest the door. He could hear her talking to Miranda, who would pilot the shuttle to the _Masada_ before taking it back to _Normandy__, _talking quietly with Shepherd before climbing in. He thought he heard Shepherd asking how their new guest was settling in and if they'd been able to find everything they needed on Noveria. Kaidan could even have sworn he heard Miranda, in her blunt Australian way, mention something about a bomb, but he couldn't be sure. Still, it was only after the ex-Cerberus agent had taken her place and gotten take-off clearance that Kaidan remembered the one symptom that had been constant among all the cases of biotic-induced madness in the late '60s: paranoia.

* * *

**a/n:** Lots of notes this go around (and a nice long chappie - half of it written tonight - mostly inspired by my re-watching of seasons 3&4 of _Enterprise_ and reading Rigil Kent's excelent "_Endevour"_ seires on FF). More will come faster with lots and lot of nice reveiws. If there's anything I've missed that needs explaining, feel free to ask as well. Oh, and Easter will really be 9 April in '86. The current date is 11 Nov 2185. According to this storyline (ie, non-cannon), the Alchera incident happened on 2 July 2183; she was revived on 14 July 2185.

_Ziehen_: to draw out

crusier classes: (non-cannon) _Hyderabad _is a Medina-class cruiser, a class built by the Alliance from '85 onward. It is named after a decommisioned Geneva-class; that class was built between '57 and '68. The _S__ã__o__ Paulo, _which Shepherd (non-cannonly) served on from early '80 to early '83, was a Warshaw-class, a kind built between '78 and '83.

O-6/three gold bars: An O-6 can be either a Captain or a Major in the Alliance Navy. Since Shepherd is unadbashedly a marine, I chose the latter; see rank convention in chapter 9's notes (though, in researching this, I discovered that Anderson's uniform has three gold bars on the shoulder, providing some back-up for my non-cannon system).

Operation: Ragnarök - since every good mission (according to the military) needs a name, this suicide mission is called Ragnarok, which means "Final Destiny of the Gods," which, for those of you unfamiliar with Norse Mythology, adds up to the end of the world. The earlier mentioned op, Operation: Cast Lead, that _Hyderabad's_ first captain's ancestor was part of is another name for the 2006 Gaza War. I've no offical stand on which side that Mr. Peirce served on and will not make one.

L2 orbit: There are five lagrange points (places where a satalite stays still relative two objects, ie, the earth and the moon) for any two objects in space. One is in front of the moon, one is behind, one is opposite, and two are roughly equalateral. L2 is the one behind.

_Khalsa ... aagay_: "Khalsa is the one who does not slander others," in Punjabi, a saying of Bhai Nad Lal's - a disciple of the 10th Sikh guru

_Yushan_: the newest dreadnought, mentioned in chapter 6, I believe.

**Crew Billets and Acronyms explained:**

_Hyderabad _(in order of senority):

Commanding Officier (CO): Major Helene Sirivedya Kaur Shepherd  
Executive Officer (CO): Staff Commander Iqbar Signh  
Chief of Engineering (CoE): Staff Commander James "Jim" Travers  
Company Commander: Lieutenant Commander Ye Han [Officer-in-Charge (OIC) of the Marine compliment]  
Chief of Security (CoS): Staff Lieutenant Marina Jurado [replaces the late Lt. Collins]  
Operations Officer (Ops): Staff Lieutenant Allis Nordin  
Chief Medical Officer (CMO): Dr. Susan Piesse [civilian rank equal to 1Lt]  
Science Officer (SO): First Lieutenant Bethany "Annie" Reed [a junior officer as _Hyderabad_ is primarily a war ship]  
Senior Enlisted Officer: Operations Chief Timothy Andrews

_Masada_ (in order of senority):

Commanding Officier (CO): Staff Commander Kaidan Alenko  
Executive Officer (CO): Staff Commander Amanda Kruger  
Chief of Engineering (CoE): Lieutenant Commander Bryon Lapierre  
Operations Officer (Ops): Staff Lieutenant Henry Oosterkamp  
Chief Medical Officer (CMO): Dr. Klaudia Greene [civilian rank equal to 1Lt]  
Senior Enlisted Officer: Operations Chief Rebekka Morgan

*****For my own sanity, Staff/Lieutenant Commander will almost always be shortened to "Commander" or "CDR", 1st/2nd/Staff Lieutenant will be shortened to "Lieutenant" or "Lt.", Service/Gunnery/Operations Chief will be "Chief", and Service(wo)man 1st/2nd/3rd class will be "Serviceman." Unless its important to the story or an intro, this will usually be the case, though, it is in cases like this where I wish the Alliance Navy operated on a more sensible means, ie, each rank wasn't qualified with staff or lieutennant or whatnot.*****


End file.
